{"id":109005,"date":"2020-02-10T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-10T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fedoramagazine.org\/?p=30252"},"modified":"2020-02-10T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-10T08:00:00","slug":"playing-music-on-your-fedora-terminal-with-mpd-and-ncmpcpp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/02\/10\/playing-music-on-your-fedora-terminal-with-mpd-and-ncmpcpp\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Music on your Fedora Terminal with MPD and ncmpcpp"},"content":{"rendered":"

MPD, as the name implies, is a Music Playing Daemon. It can play music but, being a daemon, any piece of software can interface with it and play sounds, including some CLI clients.<\/p>\n

One of them is called ncmpcpp<\/em>, which is an improvement over the pre-existing ncmpc<\/em> tool. The name change doesn’t have much to do with the language they’re written in: they’re both C++, but ncmpcpp<\/em> is called that because it’s the NCurses Music Playing Client<\/em> Plus Plus<\/em>. <\/p>\n

<\/span> <\/p>\n

Installing MPD and ncmpcpp<\/h2>\n

The ncmpmpcc<\/em> client can be installed from the official Fedora repositories with DNF directly with<\/p>\n

$ sudo dnf install ncmpcpp<\/pre>\n
On the other hand, MPD has to be installed from the RPMFusion free<\/em> repositories, which you can enable, as per the official installation instructions<\/a>, by running<\/p>\n
$ sudo dnf install https:\/\/download1.rpmfusion.org\/free\/fedora\/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm<\/pre>\n
and then you can install MPD by running<\/p>\n
$ sudo dnf install mpd<\/pre>\n
Configuring and Starting MPD<\/h2>\n
The most painless way to set up MPD is to run it as a regular user. The default is to run it as the dedicated mpd<\/em> user, but that causes all sorts of issues with permissions.<\/p>\n
Before we can run it, we need to create a local config file that will allow it to run as a regular user.<\/p>\n
To do that, create a subdirectory called mpd<\/em> in ~\/.config<\/em>:<\/p>\n
$ mkdir ~\/.config\/mpd<\/pre>\n
copy the default config file into this directory:<\/p>\n
$ cp \/etc\/mpd.conf ~\/.config\/mpd<\/pre>\n
and then edit it with a text editor like vim<\/em>, nano<\/em> or gedit<\/em>:<\/p>\n
$ nano ~\/.config\/mpd\/mpd.conf<\/pre>\n
I recommend you read through all of it to check if there’s anything you need to do, but for most setups you can delete everything and just leave the following:<\/p>\n
db_file \"~\/.config\/mpd\/mpd.db\" log_file \"syslog\"<\/pre>\n
At this point you should be able to just run<\/p>\n
$ mpd<\/pre>\n
with no errors, which will start the MPD daemon in the background.<\/p>\n
Using ncmpcpp<\/h2>\n
Simply run<\/p>\n
$ ncmpcpp<\/pre>\n
and you’ll see a ncurses-powered graphical user interface in your terminal.<\/p>\n
Press 4<\/em> and you should see your local music library, be able to change the selection using the arrow keys and press Enter<\/em> to play a song.<\/p>\n
Doing this multiple times will create a playlist<\/em>, which allows you to move to the next track using the ><\/em> button (not the right arrow, the ><\/em> closing angle bracket character) and go back to the previous track with <<\/em>. The + and – buttons increase and decrease volume. The Q<\/em> button quits ncmpcpp but it doesn’t stop the music. You can play and pause with P<\/em>.<\/p>\n
You can see the current playlist by pressing the 1<\/em> button (this is the default view). From this view you can press i<\/em> to look at the information (tags) about the current song. You can change the tags of the currently playing (or paused) song by pressing 6<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Pressing the \\ button will add (or remove) an informative panel at the top of the view. In the top left, you should see something that looks like this:<\/p>\n
[------]<\/pre>\n
Pressing the r<\/em>, z<\/em>, y<\/em>, R<\/em>, x<\/em> buttons will respectively toggle the repeat<\/em>, random<\/em>, single<\/em>, consume<\/em> and crossfade<\/em> playback modes and will replace one of the –<\/em> characters in that little indicator to the initial of the selected mode.<\/p>\n
Pressing the F1<\/em> button will display some help text, which contains a list of keybindings, so there’s no need to write a complete list here. So now go on, be geeky, and play all your music from your terminal!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MPD, as the name implies, is a Music Playing Daemon. It can play music but, being a daemon, any piece of software can interface with it and play sounds, including some CLI clients. One of them is called ncmpcpp, which is an improvement over the pre-existing ncmpc tool. The name change doesn’t have much to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[606,45,46,524,47,93,44],"class_list":["post-109005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fedora-os","tag-faqs-and-guides","tag-fedora","tag-magazine","tag-music","tag-news","tag-terminal","tag-using-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}