MPoD
Music Player Daemon (MPD) allows remote access for playing music (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Mod, and wave files) and managing playlists. MPD is designed for integrating a computer into a stereo system that provides control for music playback over a local network. It’s a great solution to link a headless computer system to your audio installation.
The iPhone or iPod Touch makes for an ideal companion to MPD with the introduction of MPoD. An intuitive and great looking interface makes it very easy to browse through a large collection of songs (my own is 10.000+), and find the album or song that you want to hear.
In the spirit of MPD and open source software, MPoD is available free of charge from the AppStore. That said, I put a lot of time into building and supporting it, and I have to pay for hardware, software and developer licenses. Therefor I’ll be happy to receive any donations, small or big, into my Paypal account to support me in my software development. Clicking on the Donate button will take you to the secure Paypal donation site.
The following features are available from MPoD:
- Connects to your MPD server over TCP/IP.
- Automatically find MPD servers that make themselves know via Bonjour/Zeroconf.
- Supports the use of a password for making a connection to the server.
- Store multiple connection profiles.
- Fast application startup.
- Now playing screen shows active playlist and playing song.
- Cover art from Amazon or local http server.
- Volume control.
- Move to previous, next song.
- Move to any song in active playlist.
- Seek in song.
- Toggle random, repeat.
- Stream mp3 directly to iPhone via icecast server or mpd (v0.15 or above).
- Play random album or random songs by shaking your iPhone.
- List of artists with drilldown to albums and songs.
- Option to hide artists that only appear on compilation albums.
- List of albums with drilldown to songs.
- Option to group songs into albums based on server directory.
- List of songs, which also displays artist and album for each song.
- All lists are searchable.
- List of all playlists.
- Save the active playlist into a saved playlist.
- Choice between ‘add to active playlist’ or ‘replace active playlist’.
- Support for last.fm.
- Full iOS4 compatibility including background operation, remote control functions, retina display.
- Works well with Mopidy (mpd like Spotify player).
MPoD version 1.5.1 is available now from the AppStore. Here are some screenshots from this version:
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It’s my favorite iPhone application ! Thanks !
But I have a lots of “Unknown Song – Unknown Artist” in the list, but all is correct into GMPD or others MPD tools…
Is it a bug inside MPoD ?
MPoD works on the data that is delivered from mpd, which is in turn coming from the ID3 tags in the mp3 files. Without correct ID3 tags song title and artist names will be missing. There may be other ways to get that data, for example by looking at directory or filenames, but I prefer to keep the solution clean and only rely on the standard ID3 data.
Please add support for the multiple audio outputs of mpd.
MrFX
[...] I put MPoD on my wife’s phone to show her how neat it is to control your mpd playlist from another room [...]
Sadly, MPoD doesn’t recognize the “composer” tag: ideally it would use composer|artist. Also, when loading a multi-CD album, it mixes-up the track order so that, for example, it lists 1-1 1-2 1-3 then 2-1 2-2 2-3, etc. It’s a great little app, and very welcome, but these faults make MPoD vexing for those with classical music collections.
Correction to the track order issue (apologies, kid jumping on back): basically, it loads all the first tracks from each disc, then the second from each disc, then third, and so on. As in (disc-track) 1-1 2-1 3-1, 1-2 2-2 3-2, usw.
Is it only me that has problems with the connection to the mpd server? Many times when I start the MPoD application I don’t get connected to the mpd-server at all! When I check the settings it says ‘connected’. After checking the connection like this again, it all works fine, the playing song is highlighted correctly. The same problem exists if you start the MPod earlier than the mpd-server. Maybe some sporadical checks would be good – like it did in the last version.
The same issue here. Nevertheless great app! Thanks! Can’t wait for the bug fix and the seeking within tracks feature.
Kind regards
Ben
Hi Berrie,
Very cool the new release. Except for the bonjour/zeroconf support thing I have a rather more important request:
Could you either add a ‘mpd update’ command before updating the local cache or at least add another button for the update of the mpd server database.
Probably the later is easier because you otherwise need to check when it is done with updating…
Bug Report: Adding music after letting music play to completion adds old music
Steps to reproduce:
1. Add an album to MPoD and let it play to completion, then the list is empty
2. Add some more, different music
3. Notice that the old music you added initially is playing instead of the new music you just added
4. Press stop
5. Add different music again
6. Notice that it works
The playlist isn’t cleared after it is finished, but MPoD no longer displays it. I’ll clear the playlist after it is completed.
Immediately on startup it looks like MPoD is trying to store the entire catalogue to a file on the iPhone. Is that correct?
My library is also massive.
I can see the playlist currently playing underneath the greyed out message.
Let me know if you want any more feedback.
G
Or maybe there is a chance not loading the library or doing so manually so that one could at least see the playlist and volume controls.
Hey,
just tested MPod on a very large library (1250 artists) with lots of files. When loading the library, Mpod exits after 30 seconds or so.
Is this fixable ?
Kind regards, John
At first startup MPoD loads all data from mpd and stores it in ready-to-use format in a local database on the iPhone. This makes subsequent startups very fast.
It does however use quite some memory and this can be a problem for very large collections. I’ve already spent a lot of time on fixing this but haven’t managed to get a fully reliable solution.
I believe there is a (nasty) work-around to not load the library:
1) on the server, temporarily clear out your mpd library (moving the tag_cache file to a temporary location and restarting mpd should do it).
2) start up MPoD, it will now load the empty mpd library into its local database.
3) restore the tag_cache file and restart mpd.
4) if you now start MPoD, it will believe there is already a valid local database and will not attempt to reload. the Now Playing screen should now work.
Hey Berrie,
Any chance the new version will have a fix for this? Maybe just the option to scan instead of always scanning at the start. Mostly I use it as a play/puse/navigate-playlisit remote for MPD not so much to create playlists, I imagine other use it like this too.
I use MPoD all the time on small DBs I just wish it would work for huge DBs
Thanks for a great app