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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Great App. The Best client for Mobile devices and MPD. Thank you.
thanks for a so far great application, i really appreciate that a lot. most important point in my opinion is the possibility to browse the folder tree and play from there. any chance to have that integrated. that would solve the problem with any compilations in the album tree. would be followed by generous donation. everything else is perfect.
Given that browsing the folder structure is the mostly made request, I’ve started to implement that today. To my surprise it has been very straightforward to add it into the existing application structure, and I had a basic version working in a couple of hours.
Now I need to do the nitty-gritty details, and do proper testing.
Great app – it’s been really useful.
One problem I have noticed is that albums are grouped under artists. This means that if you have an album which is a compilation it appears separately for each track making it practically impossible to easily select the album.
I would suggest that you group albums simply by the album name. This might cause problems where an album has a common name like “Greatest Hits”
Albums are grouped under artists, but they are also listed under the Albums tab, including compilations. From there you can play complete compilation albums.
If you have organized your albums into individual folders, under preferences you can choose ‘Group by directory’ for Album. This solves the problem with multiple albums having the same name.
Thanks for the app!
Great Software!
Tried it with up to a collection of 90k songs and it worked quite good!
Ok wasn’t as nice as a collection with 30k songs but worked really well.
Hey there…
The program is great. I have noticed three major bugs that make it much more difficult to use, however…
These are in v1.3.3, at least.
1. On startup, after the initial loading progress bar goes away, there is a period where the playlist is empty, and nothing shows in the album/artist area. During this time, using any of the controls will cause problems. For example, if I use the volume up button, the volume changes to 0, then moves up from there, so audio barely works. If I hit forward or back, the playing stops altogether. Once the playlist is loaded and shows up on the screen, everything works normally, provided nothing was pressed during that empty startup time.
2. The track currently playing does not show on the screen, especially tracks late in a large playlist. For example, if I am using shuffle, and the track skips to something starting with T, the playlist scrolls somewhere in the R or S range. This effect is magnified the farther down the playlist the currently playing song. (If a song starts with “A”, it is likely to show up somewhere in the screen.) The correct song is always highlighted with the arrow; it’s just that the scroll view is incorrect.
3. The application does not reconnect to the server on sleep; I need to quit and restart the application to make it reconnect.
A few feature requests:
- An extra option for shake mode, so that shaking can optionally just skip to a random track in the playlist
- Clicking somewhere on the currently playing track’s progress bar seeks the song to that position.
Thanks for making a great client!
2. This is a bug, I’ll fix it.
1. and 3. Are you using a slow connection (i.e. not WiFi), or is your iPhone slow to connect to your wireless network? This can cause the problems you’re mentioning, and there’s nothing I can do about that. Specifically about 3, MPoD tries to reconnect to the server 10 times, if it doesn’t succeed after those 10 tries it will give up.
From the preferences screen you can request that it retries again (in the connection section).
Cover Art,
Cover art is not that important but would be nice. MPoD works really well at controlling my media computer, Thanks.
Above I see screenshots with cover art (in the Now Playing screen of MPoD), so I guess it works for someone. It uses cover art from Amazon? How do I enable that? I am using MPoD Version 1.3.3 on a iPod Touch. Cover art would be a nice frill, but if it is not going to work that will be fine as well. Its about the music, and that works well.
Tim.
MPoD gets its cover art from Amazon, and this should work out of the box (no option to enable/disable it). Some people have reported that it doesn’t work, but I’ve been unable to find what is causing that.
I’m working on alternatives for the cover art, for example using the folder.jpg file within a directory.
As I seem to be one of the people that it does not work for, is there any information I could give you that might help you?
Tim.
Just found the problem of the missing cover art, it has to do with incorrect timezone conversions. I’ll solve this in an upcoming version.
This makes sense: cover art loads perfectly when I’m in Berlin. In the US (New York) it stops.
great app!
but i just setup icecast and i cant hear anything on the iphone. its confirmed working via a webbrowser, and its picking up the icecast output.
any suggestions?
Make sure that you have the correct setup:
Connection mode: ‘on-the-go’
Icecast server: ip address of the machine hosting the stream (without http://), e.g. 192.168.1.1
Icecast port: port on which the icecast server can be reached
Icecast url: the url where is, e.g. mpd.mp3
The above example would try to pickup a stream from http://192.168.1.1/mpd.mp3
Very nice job, i miss simply the possibility to browse according to the file tree, my music
is organised in a strucutred tree but the tagging is often bad. The tree or hierachical strucutre if often superior
to the flat tag one. Probaly a matter of taste.
Thanks anyway
The thing with taking the structure from the directory tree is, that I don’t use that mechanism myself. That inevitably gives it a low priority.
i have a feature request
it would be nice to enqeue songs to the playlist.
and/or adding them to a specific playlist without playing the song instantly.
wouldn’t that be nice?
greets
Management of playlists should be done on a desktop client, I don’t see that as a function for a mobile client.
You can enqueue songs to the active playlist by using ‘Add Mode’ instead of ‘Replace Mode’ (top-left button on the Artists, Albums and Songs tabs).
ok, you’re right.
i missed that mode-toggle.
thanks for that info.
and thanks for the nice app