Music Player Daemon – flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Music is played through the server’s audio device. The daemon stores information about all available music, and this information can be easily searched and retrieved. Player control, info retrieval, and playlist management can all be managed remotely.

Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol.

MPD simply runs in the background playing music from its playlist. Client programs communicate with MPD to manipulate playback, the playlist, and the database. It is not a full-featured music player program such as Amarok, but its clients provide similar functionality.

MPD has a variety of front-ends which communicate with the server using a custom protocol over a TCP connection. Clients include Ymuse, Cantata, ncmpc, ncmpy, Gnome Music Player Client, mpc and Ario.

Key Features

• Minimal hardware requirements.
• Plays Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, MP2, MP3, MP4/AAC, MOD, Musepack, wave files and any other files supported by FFmpeg.
• Remotely control MPD over a network (IPv4 and IPv6 supported).
• Play FLAC, OggFLAC, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis HTTP streams.
• Reads and caches metadata information (ID3 (id3v1 and id3v2)), Vorbis Comments, and MP4 Metadata.
• Metadata information can be searched.
• Buffer support for playback (prevents skipping due to high load or network latency).
• Gapless playback.
• Crossfading support.
• Seeking support.
• Save, load, and manage playlists (in M3U format).
• Volume control (OSS, ALSA, Pulseaudio and software mixers).
• Native Zeroconf support.
• libsamplerate and native sample rate conversion.
• Native support for PulseAudio, ALSA, OSS, MVP, JACK.
• Can be used as a source for an Icecast stream, in Ogg Vorbis and MP3. Other formats can be converted to Ogg/MP3 on the fly before output to the stream server.
• Easy to import new songs.
• Independent of a Graphical User Interface. Music will continue playing whether a front-end is open or not, and will continue playing even if the X server is terminated.

Website: www.musicpd.org
Support: Documentation
Developer: Xiph.org Forundation
License: GNU GPL v2

MPD is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Related Software

Read our verdict in the software roundup.

Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category. This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form.