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’ll be happy to receive any donations 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.
- Application startup in 3-4 seconds.
- Now playing screen shows active playlist and playing song.
- Volume control.
- Move to previous, next song.
- Move to any song in active playlist.
- 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 1.2 is available now from the AppStore. Here are some screenshots from this version:
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I have a suggestion. The volume adjustment is pretty clunky right now, as the client does not update the volume position until the adjustment has been confirmed by the server.
You should instead have the volume slider update in real-time, but have a phantom slider appear partially transparent that indicates the last confirmed volume setting. Once the mpd server confirms the new volume, the phantom slider will disappear. You could also have the same effect by just changing the colour of the entire slider bar to red until it syncs.
This way the user doesn’t have this awkward experience with changing the volume.
@Strom: I’m not sure if this is possible (the link from Safari into MPoD is not possible, perhaps if I would include a browser in the application).
But already there is a way to enjoy streams from using MPoD, allthough less fancy it works well for your favourite stations: start the stream once using some other mpd client, and then save it as a playlist. The playlist will now be accessible from MPoD and when selected will start the stream. This is how I’m using it currently.
It seems that will work. I just recently got my first iPhone and did not realize Safari would not open a link with another app. Loving the device, not too crazy about the access Apple allows us to have to it. The browser in the app sounds bloated, and I really like the simplicity of the app as it is.
Saving playlists should be a fine solution. I can’t imagine the radio stations change hosts very often. Thanks for the quick response!
Would like the ability to play ShoutCast streams on my MPD server by selecting them with the iPhone. Would go something like this:
1. Open MPoD or Safari and browse the ShoutCast.com directory of stations.
2. Press Tune In and have impdclient parse the .pls file and pass the stream path to the MPD server
3. Enjoy streamed music!
I have a shell script that does this on my Unbuntu system. I had to associate .pls files with it in Firefox, but I’m now able to click the Tune In and have my music start. Here are the contents of my shell script:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
export MPD_PORT=6600
export MPD_HOST=192.168.0.1
echo parameter: file.pls
mpc clear
grep ‘^File[0-9]*’ $1 | sed -e ’s/^File[0-9]*=//’ | mpc add
mpc play
Thanks for the awesome player, even if this does not get accepted!
A new version 1.2.1 that fixes the crashes is posted to the AppStore. Last time it took about 7 days before being available for download.
Thanks, I’ve been able to reproduce the crashing problem (actually only on firmware 2.2, on my iPod touch which is on firmware 2.0 this problem doesn’t occur), and create a fix for it.
On the reconnect issue, the previous version would try to connect forever which is not a good idea, in v1.2 I changed it so that it will only try once. That is problematic because connecting to wlan is pretty slow (again this seems to be mostly happening with the latest firmware), and yesterday I made some further changes so that MPoD will try to connect 3 times before giving up.
Until this is released, when this problem occurs you can go into the preferences screen and click on ‘Connect failed (click to connect)’ after wlan is active, then you don’t have to leave the application.
Last note: I’m only sure for 98%, but 1.1 reconnects to mpd even if I stay longer in standby (iPhone switch Wlan automatically off on a longer standby period) and let MPod open.