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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Hoi,
Hope you are open for suggestions on MPod. I press the ’stop’ button far to often when I intend to press ‘pause’, and consequently clear the current list of songs. Of course this has a lot to do with my individual clumsiness using touch screens. But I wondered if the ‘clear current list’ feature of the stop button can be changed to take effect after one second holding the stop button instead of just tapping it.
Other than that MPod has been an excellent tool for me.
Hartelijk dank!
When I get back to MPoD (working on some other stuff right now) I’ll see if this can be improved in one way or the other.
Thanks for fixing this! I think already late last year.
[...] habe ich auf Apache mit PHP daheim verzichtet und zufällig gleich im Appstore das Program “Mpod” gefunden. Funktioniert “out-of-the-box” der Developer hat sich sicher noch ein [...]
Works perfect
Thx a lot, with this App I could spare me the time with the installation of the Pitchfork which needs Apache and PHP.
If the App works stable I think you will get a donation for a beer
Hi there.
I got one question:
I do have quite some .wav files stored in folders. If I click “Album” MPoD seems to look for tags only. In my case I just see “Unknown Album”
“Unknown Artist”. It’s gonna be tricky to find your album of choice from a huge list of hundreds albums.
Is there a way to access (or implement) a “Folders” view? I would like to be able select a folder and add the entire content to the playlist.
Idea from a programming perspective: ( If the feature does not exist)
Perhaps it could be checked by MPod that if there are no tags the “Folder” should be listed in the album field.
When I get back to MPoD (working on some other stuff right now) I’ll look into this. Should be possible, I’ve done something similar already for displaying the track filename when that tag is missing.
Sounds good to me. THX
[...] pleased. With this setup, I can view and play my complete music collection from my iPhone using MPoD and it will automagically start playing out of the Naim [...]
Great app – just one issue. If I’m streaming in “On the go” mode and hit the Pause or Stop buttons, MPoD sends “pause” and “stop” to the MPD daemon (just as it does in “Remote” mode). I think more appropriate behaviour in “On the go” mode would be for the client to merely stop playing the stream itself without additionally instructing MPD to stop/pause (whilst leaving the current “Remote” mode behaviour unchanged – obviously).
My use case is this: my boyfriend listens to the stream in one room, on his iPhone, while I sit in my study listening to MPD play locally through my PC speakers (i.e., I’m not streaming; he is). If he hits Stop because he wants to go do something else, it stops MPD on my PC as well, forcing me to go and hit Play again. I would far prefer that MPD continue playing when MPoD stops playing the stream in “On the go” mode.
I hope this makes sense; let me know if you’d like further clarification?
Many thanks!
I fully agree with you, and this is how I would have done it (actually how did it originally) if it didn’t result in a nasty crash whenever you hit the stop button. I have been unable to solve that crash (also made difficult because I’m using someone elses code that I don’t deeply understand) and decided I couldn’t release it like that. So for the time being we’re stuck with the current sub-optimal solution.
I can no longer see album art for any of my CDs (I was able to see most of them before). I upgraded both MPoD and mpd. I am not sure which one has caused this. Any seggestions?
On August 15 amazon implements changes to its webservices, from then onwards all requests to those webservices will have to be signed. MPoD is using those webservices to get cover-art. In the two weeks before August 15 amazon is running some test periods.
Version 1.3 of MPoD didn’t sign its requests, however version 1.3.1 and 1.3.2 do and covers should appear in that version. Were you having this problem with either the 1.3.1 or 1.3.2 version?
Thanks for the explanation, Berrie.
My current version is 1.3.2 and covers still do not appear. I will uninstall and install it again to see if it changes.
Well… That didn’t fix it. I still do not have any album covers showing. Anybody else having this problem?
I just ran into the missing cover art problem on my iPod Touch. The time on the device was off a lot (said it was 02:41 whereas it’s actually 18:40). After setting the time on the iPod correctly (by connecting it to iTunes) cover art is back. Could this be the cause of your problem as well???
The reason it fails when the time is off, is because the requests to the amazon webservice have to carry a timestamp field, and if that is off too far the request is denied.
@Berrie this feature is totally awesome! i can listen to my whole music lib. where i wan’t!
looking forward for the update!
peace –mm
btw: is there a way (for non devs) to check when a update appears in the appstore?
I’m also having this issue. Looking forward to hopefully seeing a fix as this feature would be totally awesome. Otherwise, the app rules anyway!
Hi since the update to version 1.3.1 i’m not able to play music on my iphone (on the go function). i always get an error: “This movie could not be played.”. is this a config error or something known?
btw: i love your app!
peace — mirko
I am having the same problem as mm. I can view the playlist, and the application seems to be connected to my icecast stream. But, there is no audio from the stream, and when I click on anything in the playlist I get the error that mm has mentioned.
Also, the application crashes whenever I try to load a playlist.
Thanks!
Same problem here… OS version 2.2.1 (5H11).
I always thought the streaming was a gimmick that no-one would ever use in practice. Seems I was wrong.
A version that restores the original functionality was posted to the AppStore 10 minutes ago. The application crash I can’t reproduce.
Berrie,
Thanks! Which version is the latest one? I download version 1.3.1 yesterday, and I am still having that problem.
Thanks,
-Jeff
Guys, make sure you are doing MP3/Lame streaming and not OGG streaming…..I had the same problem and based on comments from an earlier date figured that the problem is to change to MP3 streaming.