Last Updated on September 1, 2020
I’ve looked at a few Music Player Daemon (MPD) clients in the past fortnight. I was bowled over by Cantata, truly sublime open source software. I was also very impressed with ncmpc, a console based MPD client.
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.
ncmpy is a curses based MPD client written in the Python programming language. It’s recently been ported to Python 3 and requires python-mpd2, a Python library which provides a client interface for MPD. Let’s see how it functions. Before doing so, we’ll need to install the software.
Installation
The software failed to install with the Arch distribution from the Arch User Repository, and you won’t find packages available for other popular Linux distributions. Let’s follow the steps to compile the project’s source code.
$ git clone https://github.com/cykerway/ncmpy.git
$ cd ncmpy
$ python3 setup.py install --user
By default, this will install the ncmpy binary into ~/.local/bin/.
You can also install the software using pip, a package-management system used to install and manage software packages written in Python.
$ pip install ncmpy
However, on my test system this command didn’t work, but your experience may be different. Do share 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 – Lyrics
Page 4 – Song Information
Page 5 – Other Features
Page 6 – Memory Comparison
Page 7 – Summary