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.
- Supports the use of a password for making a connection to the server.
- Store multiple connection profiles.
- Application startup in 3-4 seconds.
- Now playing screen shows active playlist and playing song.
- Cover art in now playing view.
- 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).
- 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’.
MPoD version 1.3 is available now from the AppStore. Here are some screenshots from this version:
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Would it be possible to add a button in the config to force MPD to reload/rebuild its database? If I change or add stuff to my collection I need to reload the MPD database manually from Firefox/Minion. Its the only reason I need Minion currently. I then reload the local database from Mpod. But Mpod seems to lack the ability to get MPD to reload. I do appreciate the fallback just introduced for dealing with “unknown” files. This fixes a frustration for those using .wav files.
I’ll see if that can be added. I personally don’t have a need for it because I have a cronjob that runs ‘mpc update’ every 15 minutes on the mpd server.
The chronjob is an OK workaround but I’m too impatient. I hope you can add the button. Perhaps the mpc update from remote is enough.
Thank you for this great application. I am new to this and I have a couple of questions if you don’t mind.
Each album is in a separate folder and album covers are also in the same folder (cover.jpg). Is it possible for MPoD to get the cover art work from the album folder?
How do I play the whole album? When I select the first song on an album it plays only that single song.
MPD currently doesn’t support passing cover art from the server to the client. Various clients, like MPoD work around this by getting cover art from amazon instead. Until MPD natively supports cover art, that won’t be changed.
To play a whole album, in Album view click on the little blue button left of the album title.
Cool. Thanks Berrie. Now I can play the whole album.
Cober art from some CDs are actually on amazon but they don’t show in MPoD. How are the CDs identified? May be I used a different name than the one on amazon??
Thanks for this great app!
One question, is it possible to remove a song from the current playlist? I can’t seem to find a way to do it…
Thanks!
Currently it’s not possible to edit the current playlist in any way. I might add some functionality for this in the distant future.
great app, thx a lot… now i can play my sound,
) )
without an additional controller (ubuntu server didn’t like my remote controller
Hi Berrie, thanks for the new version. Could I add a small feature to the wishlist? Songs without proper ID3 tag show up as “unknown song” and it is hard to distinguish. However, other mpd clients don’t have this problem (I suspect they just sustitute the filename whenever ID3 is lacking). Could you implement the same logic? Thanks!
I’ve just completed version 1.3.1, which includes a fallback to the filename in case the title mp3tag is missing.
I was originally trying it with mpd v.14 and icecast streaming in ogg (which didn’t work.) After I switched to mpd v.15 I tried streaming with icecast in mp3 instead and now it works. Thanks!
I guess I didn’t mention that anywhere, but indeed the streaming feature is limited to mp3 only.
Great software !!!
Out of curiosity, where are you getting the cover art from? Since MPD does not have this feature, I assume you are fetching the cover from itunes or amazon?
Keep up the wonderful work!
Coverart is coming from Amazon.
[...] I’m running mpd on the machine so I can play music without turning the TV on (via the MPoD iPhone app). [...]
Love v1.3!
One comment/request I have though, is to either bring back the volume slider, or make the step up/down with each volume button press smaller.
At least on my setup, the volume steps are a bit too big.s
Keep up the good work!
I’ll include smaller steps for the volume control in the next version.
Awesome! Thanks.
Great app! Thanks!!
I love the built in streaming feature however I haven’t been able to get it to work. I have a profile setup for ‘remote’ and one for ‘on the go’ however they both work the same (as a remote.) Has anyone gotten this feature to work or am I missing something? I’m running this on iphone 2g with 3.0. Using this feature would eliminate the need to switch between MPoD and a separate streaming app which would be awesome.
For the streaming to work, you either need v1.5 of mpd, which has http streaming built-in (I haven’t tested that myself), or setup an icecast server in combination with an older version of mpd. Then icecast is configured as an mpd output, and will take care of transcoding and streaming the music which MPoD can then pickup.
I need to create a description of how to do this, but I’ve been very busy recently.