Features

Please note that MPDC is not necessarily meant to replace your current MPD client, this is just an uncommon but useful supplement.

• focused on speed, efficiency and flexibility
• considers the music library and the playlists as mathematical sets to improve the MPD potential (see § Philosophy)
• lets you add music to the playlist without having to browse the library in an efficient approach
• advanced system of dynamic playlists generation, which can be combined with static playlists and MPD playlists
• Lastfm’s tags and recommendations, mpc integration and other cool mechanisms
• minimalist syntax and command-line control

Philosophy

It is quite annoying to always have to select the songs you want to listen to before you really can start enjoying them. But ordinary playlists cannot provide music for all your moods since the complexity of your music library is huge and your tastes are various. That is why MPDC introduces a new concept for MPD: collections, similar to XMMS2’s.

Collections are just subsets of the library and contain all the songs that satisfy a query with user-defined criteria (kind of dynamic playlists). With some mathematical magic, MPDC lets you select any sub-subsets of the library you want and can combine them to bring you a new collection consisting of your desired music.

$ git clone git://github.com/nhrx/mpdc.git
$ cd mpdc
$ sudo python3 setup.py install
$ mpdc-configure

Quick overview

How to describe a collection

By default, five collections are already defined and can be used by simply typing their name:

• all : all the music of the library
• c : all the songs of the current playlist
• C : the currently playing song
• A : all the songs by the artist of the currently playing song
• B : all the songs of the album of the currently playing song

These collections will be particularly useful when you will combine several collections to reach a specific goal.

Filters

Filters are at the heart of the collections. They allow you to select all the songs that meet a specific criterion, and for this purpose they rely on the tags of the audio files or their path on the hard drive.

Filters’ syntax looks like filter"pattern" where “filter” is a short alias that corresponds to a particular search criterion:

• a : search on the tag “artist”
• ab: search on the tag “album artist”
• b : search on the tag “album”
• t : search on the tag “title”
• n : search on the tag “track”
• g : search on the tag “genre”
• d : search on the tag “year”
• c : search on the tag “composer”
• p : search on the tag “performer”
• f : search on the file path, starting from the music directory of MPD
• e : search on the file extension
• x : search on any of these criteria

If a lower-case letter is used to denote the filter, the search is partial and case-insensitive.
If a capital letter is used to denote the filter, the search is exact and case-sensitive.

Operators

You should see collections as mathematical sets. With operators, you can manipulate collections, to extend them with others, to subtract them from others, etc. so as to get a new collection consisting of all the songs of the resulting set:

• collection1+collection2 : the union of collection1 and collection2 (the collection which contains all the songs of collection1 and collection2)
• collection1.collection2 : the intersection of collection1 and collection2 (the collection which contains all the songs the two collections have in common)
• collection1-collection2 : the difference (or complement) of collection1 and collection2 (the collection which contains all the songs of collections1 that are not member of collections2)
• collection1%collection2 : the symmetric difference of collection1 and collection2 (the collection which contains all the songs of either collection1 or collection2 but not of both)

Modifiers

Finally, besides filters and operators, a collection can contain modifiers which act on the whole collection on the left. Modifiers’ syntax looks like |modifier where “modifier” is the name of the modifier you want to use.

• rN : keep only N random songs from the collection
• raN : keep only the songs by N random artists from the collection
• rbN : keep only the songs of N random albums from the collection
• dN : select some songs randomly so that the total playing time is close to N minutes

List of the main commands

Now that we can describe collections, let’s see how we can use them in order to manipulate MPD.

The program is divided into four parts: mpdc-configure, mpdc-database, mpdc-playlist, and mpdc-collections. Below are the main commands the last two provide. For the full list of commands, have a look at the advanced usage page.

mpdc-playlist

add <collection>

add the songs of the collection to the playlist

addp <collection>

add the collection to the playlist and play the first added song

ins <collection>

insert the collection after the currently playing song

rm <collection>

remove the collection from the playlist

k <collection>

keep in the playlist only the songs of the collection — equivalent to rm c-(<collection>)

re <collection>

replace the entire playlist by the collection

rep <collection>

replace the entire playlist by the collection and play the first track

p <collection>

play the first song of the playlist that is in the collection

Example: if your playlist contains the entire discography of the Beatles, p t"let it be" will allow you to jump quickly to this song.

clear

clear the playlist

mpdc-collections

ls <collection>

list all the songs of the collection

Advanced usage

• How to save a collection
• How to get recommendations from Lastfm
• How to use the Lastfm’s tags with filters
• How to generate a m3u playlist
• How to use MPD native playlists with MPDC
• Full list of commands
• Configuration options