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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Hi Berry,
Great app (I know this is A LOT of work to do something like this! Heck, just getting thru apples “paper work” is a lot of work). Now for some comments and questions:
I was initially confused by the playlist management. I think some documentation on that would be good. As I understand it from playing with it, in “Add Mode”, clicking on a playlist loads it from the ipod/local m3u (and saves/maintains the m3u locally). In “Replace mode” it loads from the mpd server. Is this correct/intended?
I had one issue I saw. To recreate it, create a playlist with one (or a few) songs. When the playlist finishes playing, it disappears (I assume that’s intended) but then if I load it again, you will see the playlist with the last song duplicated.
I’d like to also second the other requests for song removal from a playlist, although it’s a low priority. I can do that from the desktop/laptop.
Last thing, when I click on “Update database” the button clicks but it appears from the ipod perspective nothing happens. I really didn’t check if anything actually did happen in MPD. I just wasn’t sure if it was normal for mpod to not provide some feedback.
Thanks again for your work. If I wasn’t swamped with my own “i” app, I’d volunteer to help out.
hi,
i tried to use mpod with my local mpdserver and it crashed while trying to get songlist.
after restarting the app, it always crashes after some seconds.
my mpdserver works (used relaxx to test it).
any suggestions?
What version of MPoD are you using, and how big is your library?
You may try removing the application (which also deletes the preferences) and installing it again.
i use the latest version (downloaded it 2 days ago from the appstore)
there are currently only 2 songs in my library.
in mpod, when i use the correct settings (server http://192.168.1.149, port 6600,…), it crashes.
after restart, it crashes while trying to get songs.
i have no clue what i am doing wrong.
any ideas?
without “http://” it works… sorry man
great app jipppii
After i upgrade to Ubuntu 9.94 and mpod 1.3 they no longer talk to each other.\
Any suggestion?
This may be caused by the setting for bind_to_address in mpd.conf (in /etc). It should be set ‘any’ rather then ‘localhost’ or ‘127.0.0.1′.
Thankyou for this fabulour iPhone app.
However while it works flawlessly over WiFi, it only connects intermittently to the mpd server over 3g. It’s almost as though when the app closes the port isn’t closed down properly – meaning that its impossible to access the icecast/mp3 stream via safari as well. Only rebooting the iPhone seems to cure the problem.
This is an intermittent problem. The app will connect time after time and then stubbornly refuse.
Perhaps this is something that could be investigated?
Also I see that you are unable to add support for cover art from *.jpg due to lack of native mpd support. However, isn’t is possible to retrieve the artwork from the tracks id3v2.* meta-data? Just a thought.
Thanks again!
Regarding the cover art: MPoD doesn’t have access to the actual .mp3 files, it only uses the standard protocol to communicate with the MPD server. That protocol doesn’t include all the meta-data.
I’ll see if I can find anything on the streaming problem.
I’ve been investigating this a little further…
On a jail-broken iPhone 3g with a swap space enbaled, MPoD works quite happily over 3g. Perhaps there is a memory issue on the 3g iPhone which won’t exist on the 3gS??
Just a thought
It could very well be a memory issue, MPoD can be a bit of a memory hog with larger databases. The 3GS has double the internal memory, so it will be less affected by memory shortage.
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First; Love the app, I use it a ton.
I do have one issue that I’ve had for quite a while though. I don’t get any album art what-so-ever. I seem to recall getting some art way-way back when i first started using MPoD but for many months now I have not gotten any. Other MPD clients are still grabbing art just as expected, so I’m not sure what’s up. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
In August I changed the artwork code to use request signing, which was made mandatory by Amazon. It seems that for some people this is causing problems, I haven’t been able to find what the issue is.
I may have a look at using cover art from last.fm as an alternative.
Another feature I would like to see added to the App is that mPod uses local Artwork before retrieving artwork from Amazon.
If you could just define the name of the artwork to look for, e.g. front.jpg or cover.jpg and have mPod look for this name in the folder on the mpd server where the album is stored, if it can’t find it it still can retrieve it from Amazon.
With my albums I get hardly any cover art, and when I do get one it is 75% of the time the wrong one and all this while I have cover art for each of my album stored with my audio files on my server.
Would this be a possible usefull addition?
MPoD uses only the mpd protocol to access data, and doesn’t have direct access to the server (and therefor also not to the cover art that is on the server). If the mpd protocol ever includes this natively, I will add support for it, otherwise it doesn’t fit in the applications design.
Great application, if I could only make it work. Being a newbie it is tough to know how to setup Mpod connection settings. I have got MPD working on my desktop, so a step by step guide for MPod once it is downloaded to the Ipod would be much appreciated. I have no idea how to set it up so that it connects to my desktop.
thanx
Not much to it really.
If you’ve got the mpd daemon running on your computer, you only have to define an MPD Server.
You do this under preferences (Playing Now button and PlayList view, have the extra menubar in view, select 1st button on extra bar for preferences)
Click on new connection: give it a name, give the IP-address of the computer where your mpd-daemon is running; leave the default port, your mpd is probab running on default as well.
Once you are connected you can do a refresh local cache under the Preferences, to have your MPD database loaded in mPod.
Then you’re ready togo.
Great application – I got MPD working on my desktop, but I have no idea how to setup connection etc on my Ipod while in Mpod. How about a step by step setup guide for newbies?
Hi Berry
Great application, also the new version works very well.
It is the most used app on my iPod.
There are two features I would like to see added if at all possible:
1. Scrolling titles (or wrapped).
Since I most often listen to classical music, which often have long song and album titles, I only get to see the first part of it. And sometimes that means that all the songs one album just look the same because they are part of one classical work (song title is often “name of work” – “name of part”) and the name of the work takes already all of the space.
2. Browse by folder structure.
.
I read that adding different Browse-by requests cost you a lot of work without much benefit. I wondered if browse by folder structure also is difficult to do. I would make things for me a lot easier, since I have got a very sensible folder structure