Have you ever wanted to listen to music without leaving your terminal? well, probably no but I am still gonna show you how to do it in this article!

I'd like to note that for this to work you need to have Music locally, you won't need your spotify account anymore

Configuring The Daemon

first we'll need to install MPD, it's a daemon that can run in the background to play music. this means that you can play music even outside a graphical environment. so go ahead and install it, it's available in most official repos

sudo pacman -S mpd
# or
sudo apt install mpd

now create a new file ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf (you may also need to create the mpd directory as well), we'll configure the daemon here

Begin by setting a few config variables, most importantly set the music_directory to where you actually have your music downloaded

music_directory "~/Music/"
playlist_directory "~/.config/mpd/playlists"
db_file "~/.config/mpd/mpd.db"
log_file "~/.config/mpd/mpd.log"
pid_file "~/.config/mpd/mpd.pid"
state_file "~/.config/mpd/mpdstate"

I've had some problems where MPD wouldn't create the state files automatically, so let's create them manually to kill the doubt

cd ~/.config/mpd
touch mpd.db mpd.log mpd.pid mpdstate
mkdir playlists

now go back to mpd.conf and add the sound configuration depending on what sound system you're using, which will be either pulseaudio or pipewire, to chekc what system you're running you can run the following command

pactl info | grep "Server Name"

# On my machine I got `Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.61)`
# which means I am running pipewire

then add the following to mpd.conf

# For PulseAudio
audio_output {
        type            "pulse"
        name            "pulse audio"
}

# For PipeWire
audio_output {
        type            "pipewire"
        name            "PipeWire Sound Server"
}

finally select the port that you want MPD to run on, make sure no other program uses this same port

bind_to_address "127.0.0.1"
port "6600"

and make MPD autostart, you can use it's systemd service to do this

systemctl enable --now --user mpd.service
systemctl status mpd.service # run this to check for any errors

Content structure

here is how your music should be structured in order for MPD to recongize it properly

Music directory
-- Band 1 - Album 1
---- Song 1
---- Song 2
---- Song n
-- Band 2 - Album 1
---- Song 1
---- Song 2
---- Song n
and so on..

Configuring the clients

Now MPD on it's own isn't very useful, that is because it wasn't made for the normal user to use, you're supposed to install a client that interfaces with MPD, there are many good clients but the two I am going to use today are:

• mpc: it's a commandline tool, so you can use commands like mpc next and mpc update to use it, it's really useful, for configuring system keybindings to pause/go to the next or previous song
• ncmpcpp: it's similar to mpc as it runs in the terminal too, but the difference is that it has an actual TUI interface (like htop for example)

let's start by installing the two of them

sudo pacman -S ncmpcpp mpc
#or
sudo apt install ncmpcpp mpc

now add this to the ncmpcpp config

[mpd]
mpd_host = "localhost"
mpd_port = "6600"
mpd_music_dir = "~/Music"
mpd_connection_timeout = "5"
mpd_crossfade_time = "5"

we're basically telling it where it's supposed to find mpd, make sure to set the port to the same one you used for the MPD config before and set the music dirctory to the same one you used for MPD

now if you run ncmpcpp in your terminal and press 4 to go to the music library view, you should see some content (make sure that you actually have some music downloaded)

Making NCMPCPP look better

Now that all the hard stuff is done let's make ncmpcpp look better

First we'll change how the progress bar looks, all the following should be added to ncmpcpp's config file .config/ncmpcpp/config

progressbar_look = "=>-"
progressbar_color = black:b
progressbar_elapsed_color = blue:b

and make the columns mode the default for every view

playlist_editor_display_mode = "columns"
search_engine_display_mode = "columns"
browser_display_mode = "columns"
playlist_display_mode = "columns"

Adding vim keybindings to NCMPCPP

If you're a regular vim user you may find navigating the client using the arrow keys to be uncomfortable, luckily you can make it use the vim keys.

Just add the contents of this pastebin to a new file ~/.config/ncmpcpp/bindings and you should be good to go.

Adding a visualizer

You can have a cool music visualizer by adding this to your mpd config, don't forget to restart the systemd unit if you're using it

audio_output {
    type                    "fifo"
    name                    "my_fifo"
    path                    "/tmp/mpd.fifo"
    format                  "44100:16:2"
}

now going back to ncmpcpp, pressing 8 for the visualizer view you should see something like this if you have a song playing, I'd say this is pretty cool!

Using The clients

As you may have noticed, we didn't configure MPC, that's because it doesn't need a configuration, as long as you use the 6600 port for MPD because that's what MPC is set to by default.

You can bind MPC's commands to keys in your keyboard, for example I have set alt+down_arrow to mpc toggle, you get the idea

As for ncmpcpp, it's made up of many views each one being mapped to a different number on the number pad, the ones I use most often are Queue view 1 for looking at the queue and Media Library 4 for selecting what to add to the queue by pressing space, going back to the Queue, if you've found a songlist you vibe with you can turn it into a playlist by pressing S, to see you're playlists press 2.

Conclusion

This article has been soo fun to write, if you have any problems with this setup be sure to reach out, other than that, I'll catch you in the next one!

if you've enjoyed this article,consider buying me a coffee. currently I am saving up for a better microphone!

Replies

lasercat_pow from

You can listen to internet radio with mpd also. Even podcasts, with some scripting. the command is just a variation of: mpc add "$(grep -o 'http[^\[<> ]*$' "$radiodir"/"$pls" 2>/dev/null | sed 's#/;##g' | tr -d '\r')" mpc play where $radiodir is wherever you have some .pls files you downloaded (maybe ~/Downloads) and $pls is a .pls or m3u or whatever

biendi from

yeah this is pretty cool. i actually never heard of mpd but i will check it out now. btw you wrote Conclustion instead of '"conclusion" at the end. anyway this is a chill post bro and i am subscribed to your rss feed so thanks a lot

downalwythbehghid from

I would really like to give anything else a shot, but mpd is just head and shoulders above the rest. It nicely supports crossfade what many other players simply give up on (transitions between tracks), it can be easily scripted with its client mpc, running in daemon mode it doesn't take away my precious terminal tab, it's fast and available in repositories of all operating systems I know of. Sorry for selling out it like that, I'm not affiliated or anything, it's just great :)

sogun123 from

I do that. Sometimes I play with cmus, sometimes with mpd.I found ncpmc suit me better than ncmpcpp. And cmus is nicer for metadata heavy searches than any mpd client.