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, mpdevil, ympd, myMPD, ampd, ncmpy, ncmpc, and ncmpcpp. 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 and mpdevil offer a GTK front-end. ympd, myMPD and ampd are web-based clients. And ncmpy, ncmpc, and ncmpcpp are terminal-based clients. So there’s something for everyone.
vimpc is a terminal-based MPD client that’s based around the vi/vim text editors. It’s free and open source software.
Installation
On our Ubuntu systems we didn’t need to install any packages first. This is because our systems already had the software’s dependencies installed (libmpdclient, pcre, libncursesw, and taglib).
Installation is plain sailing. Clone the project’s GitHub repository, compile and install the software by opening up a terminal window and typing the commands:
$ git clone https://github.com/boysetsfrog/vimpc.git
$ cd vimpc
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make -j4
$ sudo make install
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary