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.
I’ve covered a fair few MPD clients over the past year or so including Cantata, Ymuse, ympd, myMPD, ampd, ncmpy, and ncmpc. My favorite of them is Cantata although Ymuse is a simple alternative. There’s lots of differences between these front-ends. For example, Cantata uses the Qt widget set, whereas Ymuse offers a GTK front-end. ympd, myMPD and ampd are web-based clients. And ncmpy and ncmpc are terminal-based clients. So there’s something for everyone.
mpdevil is a GTK front-end for MPD. It’s written in Python and published under an open source license.
Installation
With any MPD client, the first stage is to install and configure MPD. Our review of ympd covered the basics so I won’t repeat the process here.
Once MPD is working, we can install mpdevil. The developer provides packages for Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo. There’s also a convenient package in the Arch User Repository for Arch and Arch-based distros.
If you prefer to build your own binary, you’ll need to install DistUtilsExtra. On our Ubuntu systems, we enter:
$ sudo apt install distutilsextra
Then clone the project’s repository and follow these steps:
$ git clone https://github.com/SoongNoonien/mpdevil.git
$ cd mpdevil
$ sudo python3 setup.py install
$ sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas
$ sudo gtk-update-icon-cache
$ sudo update-desktop-database
$ cd bin
$ ./mpdevil
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary