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.
Music Player Daemon (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.
Audioloader is a web based MPD client with special focus on playing music organized in folders. It’s free and open source software.
Installation
Steve has published a a short tutorial to get you up and running with MPD in Ubuntu 23.10. I tested Audioloader with both Ubuntu and Arch Linux distros.
There aren’t distro-specific packages available for Ubuntu or Arch. Instead, let’s go for a manual installation.
We’re going to use a Python virtual environment. For Arch:
$ yay -S python-virtualenv
Next, clone the project’s GitHub repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/krisek/audioloader.git
Change into the newly created directory:
$ cd audioloader
Create a virtual environment to avoid polluting our system.
$ virtualenv -p python3 venv
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ cp app.ini.tpl app.ini
Next, configure Audioloader. Copy the file and edit according to your configuration.
$ cp config.tpl.py config.py
There are some optional steps such as setting up Bandcamp and YouTube support.
We also need to setup a web server:
$ pip install gunicorn
Start the web server with:
$ gunicorn --workers 12 --max-requests 300 --bind 0.0.0.0:3400 --timeout 1800 --chdir . wsgi:application
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary