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 reviewed a fair number of graphical, terminal-based and web-based MPD clients. Let’s now take a look at Sola MPD, a web based client that needs to be deployed to a machine on your local network.
Installation
Steve has published a a short tutorial to get you up and running with MPD in Ubuntu 23.10. I tested Sola MPD with both Ubuntu and Arch Linux distros.
To get Sola MPD working I also had to add the following line to my mpd.conf file.
bind_to_address "172.17.0.1"
Once you have a working MPD installation (test it with mpc listall, we next need to install Sola MPD. The project recommends installing the software using Docker, a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. A container is software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.
Our test systems already have Docker already and configured to run without needing elevated permissions. In case your system doesn’t have this perform these steps:
Install Docker
$ sudo apt install docker # Manjaro
$ sudo pacman -S docker # Arch
Start and enable the Docker service:
$ sudo systemctl start docker.service
$ sudo systemctl enable docker.service
Issue the command to allow you to run Docker without needing sudo:
$ sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
Now log out and back in to your system.
Verify that the docker progress is running with the command:
$ docker ps
Now we’re ready to install Sola MPD. Clone its GitHub repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/prokosna/sola_mpd
Change into the newly created folder:
$ cd sola_mpd
Build a docker image:
$ docker/build.sh
If everything proceeds smoothly, you’ll get confirmation the image has been built successfully.
We’re now ready to run the image:
$ docker/start.sh
By default the software runs on port 3000, but this can be changed with the --port flag.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary