I love using the terminal. In my last post, I detailed using rtorrent + RSS feeds + queue management. I've already posted a how-to for irssi sometime back. Today I'm going to blog on setting up mpd and ncmpc, a mpd client.

First, install the packages:

$ su -c 'yum -y install mpd ncmpc'

Alright, let's set up mpd now.

Create a ~/.mpd directory and copy the /etc/mpd.conf to your ~/.mpd directory. We'll customize this sample file to our needs.

$ mkdir ~/.mpd && cp /etc/mpd.conf ~/.mpd/mpd.conf

The file is very well commented. Read the comments and edit the values to suit your set up. You need to uncomment the "pulse" section to make mpd use pulseaudio. This is a must.

That's pretty much it for mpd. Save the file, and start mpd.

$ mpd &

Now that you have mpd running, you need to install a client. A quick yum search will tell you that there are quite a few. I'm going to use ncmpc.

Create a ~/.ncmpc directory and copy the /etc/ncmpc/config to it.

$ mkdir ~/.ncmpc && cp /etc/ncmpc/config ~/.ncmpc/config ;

Again, the file is very well commented. Customize if to your needs. I, personally, just enable colours and a few other options.

That's it! Run ncmpc in a terminal, press "1" to see the controls, and play away!

I've found an audio scrobbler for mpd too, but it isn't quite working with last.fm yet. An update would fix that from what I gathered off google. Once it begins to work, I'll post on how to set it up. I'm going looking for a plugin that sends the "now playing info" to messengers such as Pidgin and Empathy.

Added reading : http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients