Re: [gentoo-dev] Xmms needs to die.

[Andrej Kacian <ticho@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 18:42:27 +0200
Robert Cernansky <hslists2@zoznam.sk> wrote:

> Thank You for the tip. I looked at mpd also (only on web page). It
> have probably good posibility to control it via command line. But what
> about xosd support? (Which I mention in my previous post.) I do not
> see any info on page about it.

mpd (and xmms2) is just a server that is responsible for music playback,
functionality such as xosd notification can be provided by clients, one
such example is here[1]. Perhaps there are more.

> What bothers me also, is that it has not plugin design like
> xmms. Support for plugins is very good because lot of people can write
> plugins for lot of things. This is why people do not want to switch
> from xmms because thanks to plugins it have so many features that
> currently no player is able to overcome it.

That is true, but if you split the media player functionality between
server and client, server doesn't need many plugins - it only needs to
support as many media types as possible.

Many xmms plugins I saw are frontend-related. This can be handled by
MPD clients. One of main clients, gmpc, recently added plugin support,
and already plugins for album covers or song lyrics are available.

> Also I read that it is not possible to play file without addind it to
> mpd's database.(?) It seems to be clumsy.

This is mainly because mpd is designed to run remotely, i.e. not on
your desktop - clients connect via TCP, so they have no idea about the
filesystem on box where mpd runs.

There are plans to allow this exact functionality via URIs in
format: "file://".

> Can it play streams from internet? Maybe I should install it and look
> at it more closely.

Yes, and what's more, the development version (release candidates too)
is also able to act as an icecast source, thus mpd+icecast2 can act as
a streaming server. I'm usually listening to music streamed from my
home box via an openvpn tunnel at work. :)

Also, mpd has gapless output by default, iirc.

1. http://www.musicpd.org/forum/index.php?topic=1189

-- 
Andrej

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