Re: Managing offline music library
Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2025 3:06 am
I've been using the Music Player Daemon (mpd or musicpd for short) for about 2 decades now
and can absolutely recommend it.
The basic premise is that it only does the playback and management parts, but no UI. Instead it offers control
through its own network protocol – which is used by a whole bunch of different clients to let you control it.
I personally use a terminal-based client called `ncmpcpp` ("NCurses MPd Client in cPP", yeah that's a mouthful),
which offers all I want, but there's a whole bunch of GUI clients for *nix, Windows, Android, iOS and more niche platforms.
It's free software (as in beer *and* freedom), available on pretty much any *nix distro and it keeps a database
of your music collection you can update at the press of a button. And it supports editing metadata tags in your collection, too.
Format/codec-wise, it can play damn near anything, including C64 SID stuff and I think even some tracker music.
Definitely all the usual suspects like mp3, flac, ogg vorbis and opus.
By now, it doesn't do literally *everything* I'd like it to, but that's mostly because I want entirely unreasonable things like precomputed audio analysis data for super-smooth audio visualization.
I've also used it to stream music from home to mobile in the past. No expensive online server needed – just an account at a free dyndns service and a port forward on your router. Audio doesn't take a lot of bandwidth – even a subpar DSL hookup is usually enough to let you stream lossless FLAC and lossy codecs like vorbis and opus are way lighter.
and can absolutely recommend it.
The basic premise is that it only does the playback and management parts, but no UI. Instead it offers control
through its own network protocol – which is used by a whole bunch of different clients to let you control it.
I personally use a terminal-based client called `ncmpcpp` ("NCurses MPd Client in cPP", yeah that's a mouthful),
which offers all I want, but there's a whole bunch of GUI clients for *nix, Windows, Android, iOS and more niche platforms.
It's free software (as in beer *and* freedom), available on pretty much any *nix distro and it keeps a database
of your music collection you can update at the press of a button. And it supports editing metadata tags in your collection, too.
Format/codec-wise, it can play damn near anything, including C64 SID stuff and I think even some tracker music.
Definitely all the usual suspects like mp3, flac, ogg vorbis and opus.
By now, it doesn't do literally *everything* I'd like it to, but that's mostly because I want entirely unreasonable things like precomputed audio analysis data for super-smooth audio visualization.
I've also used it to stream music from home to mobile in the past. No expensive online server needed – just an account at a free dyndns service and a port forward on your router. Audio doesn't take a lot of bandwidth – even a subpar DSL hookup is usually enough to let you stream lossless FLAC and lossy codecs like vorbis and opus are way lighter.