BPD Plugin ========== BPD is a music player using music from a beets library. It runs as a daemon and implements the MPD protocol, so it's compatible with all the great MPD clients out there. I'm using `Theremin`_, `gmpc`_, `Sonata`_, and `Ario`_ successfully. .. _Theremin: https://theremin.sigterm.eu/ .. _gmpc: http://gmpc.wikia.com/wiki/Gnome_Music_Player_Client .. _Sonata: http://sonata.berlios.de/ .. _Ario: http://ario-player.sourceforge.net/ Dependencies ------------ Before you can use BPD, you'll need the media library called GStreamer (along with its Python bindings) on your system. * On Mac OS X, you can use `MacPorts`_ or `Homebrew`_. For MacPorts, just run ``port install py27-gst-python``. For Homebrew, use `my auxiliary repository`_ to install: ``brew tap sampsyo/py ; brew install gst-python``. (Note that you'll need the Mac OS X Developer Tools in either case.) * On Linux, it's likely that you already have gst-python. (If not, your distribution almost certainly has a package for it.) * On Windows, you may want to try `GStreamer WinBuilds`_ (cavet emptor: I haven't tried this). .. _MacPorts: http://www.macports.org/ .. _GStreamer WinBuilds: http://www.gstreamer-winbuild.ylatuya.es/ .. _Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ .. _my auxiliary repository: https://github.com/sampsyo/homebrew-py Using and Configuring --------------------- BPD is a plugin for beets. It comes with beets, but it's disabled by default. To enable it, you'll need to edit your ``.beetsconfig`` file and add the line ``plugins: bpd``. Like so:: [beets] plugins: bpd Then, you can run BPD by invoking:: $ beet bpd Fire up your favorite MPD client to start playing music. The MPD site has `a long list of available clients`_. Here are my favorites: .. _a long list of available clients: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients * Linux: `gmpc`_, `Sonata`_ * Mac: `Theremin`_ * Windows: I don't know. Get in touch if you have a recommendation. * iPhone/iPod touch: `MPoD`_ .. _MPoD: http://www.katoemba.net/makesnosenseatall/mpod/ One nice thing about MPD's (and thus BPD's) client-server architecture is that the client can just as easily on a different computer from the server as it can be run locally. Control your music from your laptop (or phone!) while it plays on your headless server box. Rad! To configure the BPD server, add a ``[bpd]`` section to your ``.beetsconfig`` file. The configuration values, which are pretty self-explanatory, are ``host``, ``port``, and ``password``. Here's an example:: [bpd] host: 127.0.0.1 port: 6600 password: seekrit Implementation Notes -------------------- In the real MPD, the user can browse a music directory as it appears on disk. In beets, we like to abstract away from the directory structure. Therefore, BPD creates a "virtual" directory structure (artist/album/track) to present to clients. This is static for now and cannot be reconfigured like the real on-disk directory structure can. (Note that an obvious solution to this is just string matching on items' destination, but this requires examining the entire library Python-side for every query.) We don't currently support versioned playlists. Many clients, however, use plchanges instead of playlistinfo to get the current playlist, so plchanges contains a dummy implementation that just calls playlistinfo. The ``stats`` command always send zero for ``playtime``, which is supposed to indicate the amount of time the server has spent playing music. BPD doesn't currently keep track of this. The ``update`` command regenerates the directory tree from the beets database. Unimplemented Commands ---------------------- These are the commands from `the MPD protocol`_ that have not yet been implemented in BPD. .. _the MPD protocol: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/MusicPlayerDaemonCommands Saved playlists: * playlistclear * playlistdelete * playlistmove * playlistadd * playlistsearch * listplaylist * listplaylistinfo * playlistfind * rm * save * load * rename Deprecated: * playlist * volume