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:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hi Berrie, Set up MPoD a number of months ago and all was working great. Didn’t use for a while, updated to mpod 1.4.1, but now the cover art is not showing on mpod now playing screen. My setup is mpd on popcorn hour a-110 with music stored on internal hard disk, cover art is filed in the album folder and called “Folder.jpg”. All new albums stored on the hard drive are visible on mpod when I do a “update database” and “refresh local cache”. I see that under the connection profile, there is a local cover art section with URL. What should I enter into here, and is this the reason why I can’t see album art (I don’t remember if it was there on mpod 1.3)? Thanks for your help, Peter
To use local cover art, you need to setup a webserver on the popcorn hour that shares the directory structure where the music is. Then in MPoD you enter the associated URL (in my case it’s http://192.168.1.7/music), and the filename of the cover art (i.e. Folder.jpg).
Hi Berrie, sorry I don’t understand what you mean about setting up a webserver. Is there something I need to install or turn on in the popcorn hour? I tried http://192.168.1.100/Music where that is the popcornhour ip and folder name. Thanks for your help
Hello.
I’m using MPD to stream mp3 whith icecast2. MPD control with MPoD work like a charm but “On the Go” mode doesn’t work
The stream format is mp3 and i can access it with any player (VLC or Amarok on my computer & Fstream on my iPhone 3G).
So i’ve to launch MPoD, make playlist, start read, quit MPoD, launch FStream and connect to my stream …
Do you have an idea ?
Thank you.
(Sorry for my english … i’m French)
for now I have only one problem.
I use the Mpod basically for streaming web radios. But I like to add to each radio station his own image. If I have one folder.jpg in the paylist folder, it will displayed on the screen correctly.
But how I can use multiply m3u files with different folder graphics? Create subdirs with folder.jpg and m3u in the playlist folder does not work. Is there any chance to use images like the m3u file name (station1.m3u and station1.jpg) or embedding subdirs?
thanks for your hard work.
I use playlists for internet radio.
how do I put comments in the playlist that would appear so its not just an ip address
ie http://208.43.8.181:9208
The name of the playlist file is used by mpd. E.g. I have a file named “Studio Brussel.m3u” in folder /var/lib/mpd/playlists which contains http://81.173.3.24:80.
What’s subsequently shown in the header of MPoD is depending on the data that the station is providing, sometimes this is only an ip-address, in other cases it may include actual track numbers.
Have a look at this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U
you can use #EXTINF to title a webradio.
for example: play.m3u with the content:
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF: Alltime Oldies
http://208.43.8.181:9208
Have you considered redesigning the program so a user can control MPD while the local database is being uploaded?
Sometimes when I load MPD I get a 37 second wait for database update, “optimizing speed”, and other stuff.
If you opened up another TCP/IP connect to control MPD, this could work.
I’m not spending time on further optimizing how the local database cache works, because I come to believe it is not the ideal solution yet. It is preferable to only take data directly from the server, but mpd currently is not providing all the functions that I need to get this going.
Don’t know yet in which way this is going to develop.
How about being able to pause the music without having to wait 37 seconds for the local database to update?
Controlling the music and downloading the database should be concurrent.
First of all : Thanks for this beautiful piece of Software!
Unfortunately, I had trouble playing music on the iPod. Control of the MPD, however, was possible.
It was only a re-installation of MPOD brought the iPod to sing my songs to …
BTW: I miss a search function. For example, I would like to play all the pop songs of 1990.
Note, here’s my setup …
Server:
MPD 0.15.9-1
built-in HTTP streaming server with “encoder:lame” and “bitrate:128″.
Client
iPod touch with fw 3.1.3
MPoD 1.4.1
* Connection mode : On the go
* Server : node123.network.local
* Port : 6600
* Stream :
** URL http://node123.network.local:8000
** Buffer time : 10
There is a search function on title, but not on anything else. More advanced searching is beyond the scope of the client as I currently see it.
[...] Makes No Sense At All » MPoD – (tags: audio interface stereo stream iphone app music ) [...]
Hi Berrie
I run into a strange problem with mPod showing cover art. I think I have the problem narrowed down to mPod behaviour.
On some albums my cover art is shown by mPod and on some albums it is not and I can’t figure out why. Even the a copied jpg is shown for one album and not for another album. All jpg’s are accessible by direct URL, both from PC and from iPod.
All the music is playing, but not all cover art is shown.
My setup is Popcorn A-100 with mpd, music on UbuntuServer-based NAS, cover art in music directory, the mpd music directory is mounted using NetworkMounter. The database consists of 418366 lines (14.8 MB)
Below are some parts from the mpd-database regarding two album that have the problem:
Cover art:
front.jpg
Format : JPEG
File size : 98.3 KiB
Width : 400 pixels
Height : 567 pixels
Is shown for:
directory: Le Royaume Oublié (Savall – Hesperion XXI – Capella Reial) (2009)
mtime: 1270821931
begin: CD Collection/Klassiek/Savall (Jordi)/Le Royaume Oublié (Savall – Hesperion XXI – Capella Reial) (2009)
songList begin
Not shown for:
directory: Le Royaume Oublié (Savall – Hesperion XXI – Capella Reial) (2009) – WAV
mtime: 1270896630
begin: CD Collection/Klassiek/Savall (Jordi)/Le Royaume Oublié (Savall – Hesperion XXI – Capella Reial) (2009) – WAV
songList begin
Cover art:
front.jpg
Format : JPEG
File size : 113 KiB
Width : 500 pixels
Height : 495 pixels
Not shown for:
directory: Diaspora sefardí – Monserrat Figueras, Jordi Savall
mtime: 1270832396
begin: CD Collection/Klassiek/Savall (Jordi)/Diaspora sefardí – Monserrat Figueras, Jordi Savall
songList begin
ANy help is welcome
-
aleg
Hi Berrie
I nearly solved this issue myself.
The situation arrises when there are diacrital signs in the directory names.
When I remove these then it works fine.
Would it be possible for you to solve this for the local access to the cover art?
More so because the music is playing fine from these directories and also the cover art can be accessed directly using a URL containing these diacritical signs.
So my guess would be the mPod is not properly converting the directory name to a URL when there are diacritical signs in the directory name.
For now I will rename the directories concerned, but it would be nice to be able to use diacritical signs as in spanish and french and eastern languages.
-
aleg
I think you’re right that there is a problem with special characters like é. Due to other projects I’ve not been paying attention to MPoD in the last months. If I get some time I’ll look into this particular issue.
[...] control for MPD (Music Player Daemon). Featuring an intuitive user interface, MPoD makes it veryMakes No Sense At All MPoDThe iPhone or iPod Touch makes for an ideal companion to MPD with the introduction of MPoD. … and [...]
Berrie,
Any reports of ‘not connecting’ thru 3g for ‘On the Go’?
I keep getting ‘no connect’, if I then start Safari and load a web page to get the ‘data connection’ going, and then start Mpod, then it connects and works ok. Ideas?
Thanks,
Tim