A new: “MPD”

Published by TheJoe on 28 February 201028 February 2010

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Caution

This article was published more than a year ago, there may have been developments.
Please take this into account.

MPD in computer science is an acronym for "Music Player Daemon”, a first for the world of computing.

So far we have been accustomed to think of the player as audio programs monolithic, potentially also very heavy, which take charge of all operations related to audio files. To cite a few examples "Windows Media Player”, “iTunes”, “Amarok”, “Exaile”. All these programs create a playlist by listing the contents of one or more folders inside the pc, and possibly by organizing them according to the data stored within (as is the case with the EXIF data of the photo), I play and eventually equalize (plus some optional feature such as the management of the covers, i test, purchase tickets, etc..). On the contrary, MPD is a demon. Natively developed for GNU/Linux, but also available for Mac OS X, does not have a graphical front end, creates an environment ma "hospitable"For the GUI and command line programs that rely on it. Here are some characteristic of MPD:

plays all file types supported by FFmpeg, to name a few: “.ogg”, “.flac”, “.wav”, “.mp2”, “.mp3”, “.mp4”, “.against”, Musepack
allows the remote control tramite the online (supports both IPv4 and IPv6)
reproduces the stream HTTP type FLAC, OggFLAC, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
reads and caches meta information, i Vorbis commenti e i when mp4
you can make the search metadata
supports buffering per il playback (prevents the latencies associated with the use of the network)
supports crossfade fra le traccie
salvo, loads and manages the playlist in formato m3u
controls the dei volume mixer U.S., ALSA, PulseAudio
supports Zeroconf natively
natively supports PulseAudio, ALSA, U.S., MVP, Jack and Mac OS X
can be used as source stream Icecast, in Ogg Vorbis the mp3. The other formats are not supported, but may be encoded in Ogg or mp3 "on the fly"Before starting the stream
does not depend on no GUI. The music continues to play both the X server is open or not

Look here: Stream images from the webcam every minute with GNU / Linux

Tested on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Mac OSX and HP-UX. The developers are currently working for the porting su Windows.

Among the GUI to use with the program point out Gnome Music Player Client, that contrary to expectations (saw the name) does not rely on the Gnome libraries. This player is developed by the developers of MPD.

For some tests the workload of the CPU was much lighter if it is running MPD compared to a traditional program.