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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I just upgraded to the new version and the improvements are obvious and work well. However there is stll one annoying bug- for me. I have as many as 5 mpd servers running in my network at a time. I use bonjour/avahi to name them so I don’t need to keep IP addresses straight. If one of the servers is missing and I try to select it in MPOD the application will lock up. Typically I need to delete MPOD and reinstall it to recover. With everything else working so well this is frustrating. I will try with ip addresses to see if it behaves the same. It has been consistent through the revs.
The application shouldn’t lockup, but does become unresponsive for some time when it can’t find the server. It tries to connect to the server 10 times, each with a timeout of 3 seconds, and after that it gives up. Then you should be able to select another server.
The reason for the high number of retries is that when MPoD is active and the device is awaken from sleep, it can take quite some time before the WiFi is available again.
I still have a “crash” problem when MPOD can’t find the server. Once in a long while it comes back and asks but usually it just crashes and exits. The only workaround for that seems to be a remove and reinstall. I’m using bonjour to find the server with a name ending in .local. When it all works its great but a missing server locks it up. Also happens with ip addresses.
Is there any other info that may help? I have had the problem on US iPods and iPhones and on Hong Kong iPhones.
Thanks for a very nice application. It does all I need, with the exception of two things. One is browse by – I believe it’s possible to browse by any number of tags as configured in mpd. E.g. I usually browse by genre and by composer, sometimes by title but never by album or artist. It would be nice if at least one of three browse options you offer – Artist, Album or Song – would be made customizable. E.g. you could add in preferences a combo box where the user would choose the tag to browse by, as supplied by mpd. Then the button(s) in the main menu would show this browse option. Ario offers something like this (though a bit buggy). The other feature – for which I am not holding my breath because I’ve seen no client that offers it – would be the ability to delete a song from the current playlist. In fact I don’t see the option to delete from the “now playing” either, unless I’m missing something. I can relegate playlist management to the laptop so this isn’t a huge issue. Browse by would however be extremely useful as usually I start the mpod with intention to listen to a particular piece.
Once again thanks for the application!
The issue here (and for the previous poster as well) is that with the current application design, adding grouping by Genre and Composer has a significant negative impact on startup and database refresh performance.
Making changes to that will take me a great deal of time compared to what it brings, so it’s unlikely that this will be added anytime soon.
I used an MPD client for a Nokia internet tablet that somehow supported being able to delete songs from the playlist.
Thank you for this app. When I was thinking of what sort of app I’d try writing for the iPhone I thought maybe I’d try an MPC client… until I found MPod. Nice work.
Hi there!
.
I was wondering if it would be possible to include some sort of Genre-playback? My girlfriend has a different music taste than I have, and it would be nice if I could select all the “Metal”-songs for when I’m listening; and she could choose “Folk”… I could make a playlist, but this wouldn’t be updated when I add new songs… Now choosing random gives some ’strange’ combinations
Thanks in advance!
Hey there,
Thanks for the awesome MPD client for the iPhone.
Donated a bit.
Thanks again,
Onno
I’m having problems with streaming audio from my Icecast server. Which parameters do I need to fill in on the MPoD configuration? In the app it says that there is more info about the On the Go on this website, but where can I find it?
Yeah, I didn’t get around to writing the ‘more info’. You need to select ‘On the go’ as the connection mode, you then get 3 extra settings on the connection view:
Icecast server: the ip address where the stream can be picked up goes here.
Icecast port: the port on which the stream can be picked up goes here.
Icecast URL: the url on which the stream can be picked up goes here.
If you stream from your home onto the internet through a router, you need to make sure that port forwarding in the router is set up correctly. You can try connecting to the stream from a browser first, once that is working you can use that data to fill in in MPOD.
Well, I tried that, but still it doesn’t work on MPoD. It works from a browser though. The settings that I use are
Icecast server:
Icecast port: 8000
Icecast URL: http://:8000/mpd.mp3
I still get ‘Audio Error’ ‘Attempt to play streaming audio failed.’
What am I doing wrong?
Oops, it doesn’t really show the settings correctly… Again:\
Icecast server: http://www.myserver.tld
Icecast port: 8000
Icecast URL: http://www.myserver.tld:8000/mpd.mp3
If the working browser url is http://192.168.1.1:8000/mpd.mp3, then you should use the following:
Icecast server: 192.168.1.1
Icecast port: 8000
Icecase URL: mpd.mp3
Well, I tried the last thing you suggested and it mysteriously changed the URL to something like “httpmpd.mp3″ or “httmpd.mp3″. After a few tries MPoD did what I told it to do and now it works like a charm.
You’re the king.
I have been looking for something exactly like this program for a while now. I had connection issues from the iPhone to the MPD server. Sonata on multiple machines within the network connected with no hesitation. I noticed if I set the MPD configuration to not bind to any address but only to a port, the iPhone connected immediately. Several hours of frustration and I got it to work.
As far as the program crashing after a one time run, if you edit the settings to not run the autoload of tracks at startup, it wont crash. I had to uninstall and reinstall a couples times before figuring that out as well. Now all is working great! Thanks for your software. Instant fan!
Ubuntu 9.04 Linux Mint Edition | Ubuntu 9.10 | Slackware Xbox | iPhone 3G 3.1.2 Jailbroken | iPhone 2G 3.1.2 Jailbroken
The crash is caused by the library being too large. I now have a version that can handle much larger libraries, which I hope to release soon.
MPoD looks great, but I came across an issue when accessing my music collection. I have several miscellaneous song directories where the album tag for each song is simply the artist name followed by the word ‘Singles’. Apparently, MPoD seems to want to group these all under the same album which is equal to the album name associated with the first file in the directory. I’ve looked at other MPD clients and the MPD daemon is picking up the album name correctly — it just seems that the MPoD client is making an assumption that all files in the same directory should be associated with the same album. The album tag itself seems to be ignored. Is there something else I should be looking at?
The option ‘group albums by directory’ controls this: when set to yes, everything in one directory will be combined into a single album. If set to no the album title will be used. So setting this to no will give you the desired behavior. The downside of setting it to no (and the reason for the group by directory option) is that if you have multiple albums called ‘The best of’ or ‘Greatest hits’, they will be seen as a single album.
Terrific. I should have looked one more option down
. Thank you for making such a terrific application available for a free download from the App Store.
Great app. I was going to write one like this myself, but you did it for me. Its made my Linux-based music system the envy of my friends. I’m donating some $ to encourage you to keep working on it.
Hi,
thanks for a great application, it has worked flawlessly until now. The only problem I’ve recently encountered is that the local cache isn’t updating to reflect changes to the database. I’ve looked through the database on the server and new songs are being added there – just not updating locally.
You can either update the local database manually by selecting ‘Refresh local cache’ from the preferences screen, or have MPoD detect updates on the server at startup and refreshing it cache in such case, by selecting Yes for the Auto refresh cache option, again from the preferences screen.
I love the software, it’s made my linux based HTPC complete. Thankyou.
I’m having a slight problem in that I can’t seem to connect to the mpd server when I add my whole music library (which is about 25,000 songs), whereas it connect fine when I’ve only got a few albums in my database.
Is there a limit to the amount of songs mpod can handle? If so, is there a work around so I can load my whole music library?
In the past weeks I’ve made a new version that is able to handle larger databases. I still need to fix some bugs, hope to release this in the next month.
I’ve also got a huge mpd database and am very keen on testing the new version.
I sent the new version which includes support for larger libraries to the AppStore last Sunday.
Hi Berrie.. I dont know what bug I am hitting, but I am not able to connect to my mpd server since I updated my mpd server OS (from fedora10 to fedora 12). The app on my Ipod Touch (OS 3.1) is stuck at “Optimizing Performance”
Other clients like GMPC and Sonata connect fine.