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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Bug Report:
MPoD crashes instantly when loading up
Reproduction:
I’m not sure, but it doesn’t matter if my mpd server is up, down, playing, not playing, etc. When I start MPoD it finishes expanding the interface with greyed out icons saying “Nothing playing”, and as soon as the screen expands to full size, it quits and goes back to the application menu. Restarting the iPod Touch doesn’t work.
Software:
iPod OS 3.1.2 and 2.1, iPod Touch 1G, latest version of MPoD as of this posting.
Do you know what the problem might be?
Nevermind, deleting and reinstalling the app made it work again.
Probably the cached db got corrupted, a re-install would fix that.
I had MPoD crash on startup on two iPhones while trying to do first time config. all kinds of problems made me think the app was very unstable.
i’d take a guess and say that the first time file creation done by the app is a little flaky, or requires you launch, exit and then relaunch.
i was about to lodge a bug that said “MPD Server Name cannot have a space” as this caused MPoD to bomb, but I think the problem is a little more fundamental.
the developer probably isn’t fully aware of this as the issue only exists the very first time MPoD is installed. after that point the required setup/ini/cache files have been created.
Do you have a sure way of reproducing the problem?
Thanks for a great app! This is just what I was looking for!
Do you have a specific location to put feature requests, or just leave it in the comments section?
Thanks again,
KJ
Just leave it here, then I’ll read it and see what can be done.
It would be nice if the album art rotated, like it does when you are listening to music on your iPod. The other thing I think would be nice, is a progress bar down below the album art. It could disappear when the controls are active.
Again, thanks for a great app.
KJ
Tanks a lot for an excellent app. It became outstanding since there´s the possibility to browse folders. I t would very helpful to have a button to clean the playlist i.e. to have an empty playlist (when using it with popcorn hour media streamer and watching movies the playlist starts automatically) thanks in advance. dablju
Hit the stop button once to stop the music, hit it a second time to clear the playlist.
MPoD seems to be working well as a MPD remote but I’m stuck trying to get the On The Go mode working. I recompiled MPD to support LAME and have streaming working well through iTunes on OS X 10.6. VLC reports the stream’s codec to be “mpga”. When I switch the mode on MPoD to on-the-go and try to play a song, I get a popup error on the phone, “Attempt to play streaming audio failed”, yet VLC and iTunes on my laptop update to the new track. So it seems like it’s able to control the server, just not play the stream locally. Any thoughts?
Icecast v2.3.2
MPD v0.15.8
MPoD v1.3.3
just saw and install MPoD v.1.4.0. I no longer get the error message, but there’s still no audio on my phone.
MPoD can only playback mp3 streams, I think you’re using another format. MPD 0.15 has built-in capabilities to stream mp3, without the need for Icecast. Check the audio_output section in the mpd.conf file for “httpd”, using the lame encoder.
Awesome, that was it!
Very good software indeed! This is has become my main remote control, now that I “found again” my ipod touch.
Couple of suggestions comes to mind:
- Autoreconnect when not connected and activating UI again (bringing out of screen lock / doing anything on GUI)
- Albums from Various artists collected under one title in Artist view, e.g. “Various”
Auto reconnect is there, and it tries for a limited time. I tuned the reconnection in the best possible way, without making the application unresponsive.
Thanks for the new update. I loved the app even though cover art wasn’t working for me and now that it is .. brilliant!
Hey,
Thanks so much for the app — MPod is fantastic! I’m having a little trouble getting cover art, but that’s all.
Cover art doesn’t work well when your timezone is far away from GMT. This will be fixed in the next release.
I set my clock to GMT and cover art came back. This is a good temporary solution until the new version comes out. Thanks Berrie.
Very good app! Thanks for it.
You are right serious playlist editing should be done on desktop, but simple song remove tool would be greatly appreciated anyway. If i simply clicking up some songs to play, and I missclick the twelfth, now I have to start from scratch. A common “horizontal slide for delete” function would be a great help here.
Hi,
I tested your application on a borrowed iPod today.
)
This really becomes the main reason for me to buy an iPod,
really great work, it`s amacing how mature the application is.
Just as an additional feedback, the following features would be nice:
- I miss a delete from playlist possibility. Sometimes you add a song
by accident, so it would be nice to remove it again from the playlist
The only possibility I have found is to replace the whole playlist with a new song…
- I have organized my songs trough folders… so folder browsing
would be really great, and I saw in the other comments that you are already
looking into that.
- If I access a playlist, I might not want to play the whole playlist.
For example, I organized my Radiostations as one playlist.
Does not really make sense to add all of them to the actual playlist.
It would be nice to have two options. (Add all, add single)
- The shake feature is nice, but an additional option to jump to a random
song in the playlist would be very nice.
MPod is really great work and as soon as I have an own iPod, I will
certainly help testing, if needed.
Best regards,
Günter
Very nice to work on adding broswing base on the file tree structure. I wish i could help
but if i know how to make program for personnal use under linux, i have no idea how to use the ipod interface. Theoretically
making a mpd client is conceptually easy, all the difficulty is in the details.
Thanks and wishing you the best.