Linux has several good music players (RealPlayer, Totem, Banshee), some great music players (XMMS, Rhythmbox), and one awesomely fantastic music player that beats those found on any other operating system: Amarok. Those are all very cool programs, with one thing in common: a GUI.
So what if you don’t want or need a GUI? What if you want to control the music your computer is playing from across the room? What if you want the ultimate in speed and stability? Then you want a music player that was built for the command-line. You want the one-two, knock-out combination of MPD (Music Player Daemon) and ncmpc.
Start by installing MPD. You can get the source code from http://www.musicpd.org/files.shtml, or via your distro’s repository. Debian and K/Ubuntu users, for instance, can simply use apt-get install mpd.
Once MPD is installed, you need to create a configuration file. If you control your machine, you’ll want it to end up at /etc/mpd.conf; if you can’t create that file, or you’d rather have it in your home directory, create ~/.mpdconf. The easiest way to create the file is to copy mpdfconf.example to the new location and then edit the new copy. The example configuration file is very well commented, so you should be able to figure things out. Nonetheless, here’s a useful /etc/mpd.conf file:
music_directory "/home/scott/music" playlist_directory “/home/scott/.mpd/playlists” db_file “/home/scott/.mpd/mpd.db” log_file “/home/scott/.mpd/mpd.log” error_file “/home/scott/.mpd/mpd.error” pid_file “/home/scott/.mpd/mpd.pid” state_file “/home/scott/.mpd/mpdstate” user “scott” bind_to_address “any” port “6600″
MPD first scans your music collection…
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