Last Updated on August 11, 2021
Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.
MPD is a powerful server-side application for playing music. In a home environment, you can connect an MPD server to a Hi-Fi system, and control the server using a notebook or smartphone. You can, of course, play audio files on remote clients. MPD can be started system-wide or on a per-user basis.
ampd is a web-based client for MPD. It is built with Angular and Spring Boot. ampd is cross-platform software. We tested the software on Ubuntu, but as ampd is written in Java, it’ll run on a wide range of Linux distributions and non-Linux based operating systems. You’ll just need a Java 11 runtime on your system.
Installation
Before installing ampd you’ll need a working installation of MPD on your system. Installing MPD is outside the scope of this review.
ampd is available as a JAR, a package file format typically used to aggregate many Java class files and associated metadata and resources (text, images, etc.) into one file for distribution.
You can literally download the JAR file to a directory, and start the software with the command:
$ java -jar ampd-1.2.4.jar
ampd is open source software. But I’ve not had the opportunity to see if compiling the software is straightforward. Share your experiences in the Comments section below.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary