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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This program looks absolutely amazing, and I’m ecstatic that you’ve chosen to provide it for free. My only problem is that I don’t have a credit card, and therefore cannot use appstore! I would happily pay for the program if I could, but not having a credit card makes life difficult sometimes. Is there any way to provide a download link from your site. My iphone is jailbroken as I have to use it with Linux, and so installing from an app file would be no problem for me.
The following page shows how you can create an AppStore account without a credit card: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534.
[...] now, with the help of mpd and MPoD, I’m listening to a random selection of 100 songs across my whole music collection just with [...]
Thank you very much for this application.
Hi Berrie, first of all I would like to say thanks for making such a great app. It makes it very convenient to access my mpd server anywhere in my house. Lately my cover art is not displaying at all, no matter what album. I tried reinstalling the app without success. It has been doing this since one of the updates (can’t recall which one) Is there something I am doing wrong?
I searched through the previous posts and ran into the thread on how Amazon made changes to its web services, and that the latest version should have correctly these problems. I got version 1.3.2 and its still not working. I also made sure the time on my iphone was set correctly, it auto-sets itself so I don’t believe that is the issue.
Can you send me your tag_cache file? It’s probably in /var/lib/mpd on your server.
Sure thing, heres my tag_cache: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZQ6KYIN0
Thanks for your help!
I reported the same problem a while ago. Maybe they are related and hope that there will be a solution soon.
Regardless, MPod is a n excellent application.
Hi, first of all let me complement you with creating a great app!
I do have a small question doh…
I’ve recently updated all my MP3 tags to include song number, title, album and artist.
However, after re-indexing the database (from the app), i get a lot of Unknown Albums?
After doing some research, i’ve noticed that the genre is missing from these mp3’s.
Could that be the problem? Or do you perhaps have an other idea? Thanks!
Hi Berri.
Thanks for a great app. Works like and charm and very stable.
I was wondering if it would be possible to include a “update database” button somewhere in the preferences page? It seems to be missing (or I’m not looking hard enough).
At the moment I have to update the DB using Music Player Minion, and new music won’t show up until it’s updated. How is everybody else doing this?
Cheers.
/Donny
I’m working on an update right now, and will include a button to update the database in the preferences.
How I’m doing it is through a cronjob on my server, that runs every 15 minutes, so my library is almost always up to date.
The update procedure shouldn’t be necessary any longer. I haven’t tested already.
http://www.musicpd.org/mantis/view.php?id=2091
hellou!
hum something goes wrong with the otg function. each time i want to play music otg, there appears an error which say to me: attempt to play streaming audio failed. is there an error in my icecast config:
icecast server: sub.domain.tld (whitout http://)
Icecast Port: 8000 (right one)
Icecast URL: /mpd.mp3
i can listen to the music with safari but this is annoying me.
anyway, this is still a great tool!
–mm
[edit] – works now… dunno why
Good when problems solve themselves…
Just wanted to say thanks for a great piece of software. I’ve been hacking around with different solutions for the past year but my PC couldn’t really take the strain of serving up a front-end + sqldb + mpg321 (using an original microclient jr. with 128mb or RAM and a ~200MHz proc.)
Now that I have this ideal front-end to mpd I’m a very happy camper. Come payday I’ll be sending you a contribution for sure.
Kudos on a well put together effort.
Hi Berrie, this is a great app! One thing I am not sure about is the album art – looks like it is being pulled from the web (e.g. getting a japanese cover) rather than the image saved as folder.jpg in album folder on my PCH. Anyway to get MPOD to take the album art from the music folder?
Thanks for the positive comments. Regarding the cover art, yes, this is coming from Amazon. As long as the mpd server doesn’t support cover art, that will be the only way to do it. There has been talk about including this in mpd, but so far that didn’t happen.
OK, I understand, will keep an eye out! Donation on the way for this great app! Thanks
For the most part MPOD works fine. However when it can’t find the host it crashes out (login wait a long time at a dark screen and MPOD exits), not giving me the option to change the server. This is happening on both an iPod touch and an iPhone. The only way I have been able to overcome it is to remove and reinstall.
When I get back to MPoD (working on some other stuff right now) I’ll look into this.
Further testing suggests the problem may be related to low memory on the iPod. its possible that some app has a memory leak or some such. A (now not acceptable to Apple) free memory app seems to restore operation. I just verified it again. I used an iPhone with 7.8 MB free. The app crashed while I was adding a server (it had none set in it). Using System Activity Monitor to free memory it opened 48 MB. Then after setting a server and loading a database I had 33 MB free. I hope this makes sense and suggests a way to deal with this issue.
I have confirmed again that MPOD has a problem when there are too many mpd servers and the one its trying to connect to isn’t live. The only fix seems to be remove and reinstall.
I’ll look into it, and see if I can reproduce the problem (and then off course fix it).