Music Player Daemon For Linux

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is an open source, powerful, free and flexible command-line software project implemented in C++ and designed from the offset to act as a server-side tool for playing music in the background.

In other words, MPD is a jukebox server to which various audio playback clients can connect to. Thanks to various libraries and extensions, Music Player Daemon is capable of playing a wide variety of audio files (MP3, FLAC, OGG, AAC and WAV) while being controlled by its network protocol.

As mentioned, MPD is a daemon that runs in the background, so you will need a client to connect to it and interact with its core functionality, such as skipping songs, replay audio tracks, etc.

Available command-line clients include the command-line based mpc (Music Player Client), ncmpc and ncmpcpp projects, as well as the graphical gmpc (Gnome Music Player Client) and ario applications.

To install and use MPD on your GNU/Linux operating system, you will have to download the latest version of the project from Softpedia or via its official homepage (see link at the end of the article), save the archive somewhere on your PC and extract its contents using your favorite archive manager utility.

Open the built-in Terminal app of your distribution, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/mpd-0.19.6), run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure/optimize and compile the program, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide.

Run the ‘mpd --help’ command in the terminal emulator window to view the available command-line options. These allow you to terminate the currently running mpd daemon, use it without a configuration file, as well as to do no detach the daemon from the console.