This is just an introduction post to Mopidy and mpd (Music Player Daemon).

Both are music players that come without GUI but there’s a wide choice of client software for it (Console and GUI). Both default to be using localhost as server, but they can be configured to be used over a network e.g. a LAN at home or – dare I say it ? (hahaha) – a company office or government building, a desert island in the Pacific Ocean and so on.

I used to happily use mpd for years on a Raspberry Pi … but not Every After … until one day probably due to a software upgrade or some glitch or user mistake it stopped working. Because I had not documented how I configured the audio for server usage I started to try to fix and got lost in Internet searches and it was then that I decided to test Mopidy. It turned out that Mopidy was even more difficult to get going, at least for me, but it was not an uninteresting journey. I learned that Mopidy uses GStreamer, and Mopidy only supports audio files, or it seems so. Perhaps I couldn’t figure out how to let it play audio from video files with extensions like avi, mp4, mkv, webm. And converting all these music videos into audio would take a lot of time (Yes, no top500 super computer in the basement here :^).

My plan now is to use another computer here to setup mpd, and then figure out how to configure PulseAudio to make mpd available over the LAN, document that, and then do the same for Mopidy and then blog-report that into a how-to back here.

Till next time! 🙂