What MPD Is and Is Not

This list is not the "final word". If intelligent arguments can be made, and code could be presented by those who want the feature, modifications can be made. These are simply the strong feelings held by most of those who maintain MPD.

MPD Is



 * A server that plays music (Music Player Daemon)


 * A queue and control for your music.
 * Can be controlled through various clients locally and over the network with TCP.


 * A music file decoder with various open source audio input plugins and output plugins, using multiple outputs simultaneously if requested.


 * A HTTP input streamer.
 * an HTTP website URL can be an added to the queue, or played directly (supported filetypes only).

MPD Is Not

 * An album art protocol.
 * Though there are many clients which support album art.


 * An equalizer.


 * A music tagger.
 * There are some clients that are capable of tagging music files, though, since tagging capabilities aren't built into the server, the music collection must be locally accessible.


 * A text parser for your playlist files.
 * Though it will parse its own playlist files and various clients can parse yours, though not all clients.


 * A statistics server.
 * This would be better accomplished by a companion server. We follow the KISS principle here.


 * A music visualization output.
 * Visualization of the output can be done by an independent audio program.
 * An output plugin could help.
 * MPD clients could decode and visualize the file themselves in sync with the server.
 * projectM can create visualizations for pulseaudio-servers, among others.


 * A remote file server.
 * OpenAFS, NFS, sshfs, samba and many other network file systems are more than capable.


 * A protocol to send music output to your client.
 * You can use the pulseaudio and icecast output plugins.


 * A video server.
 * This is not the intention and it's not practical for MPD to be a video server. Something more along the lines of Video Lan Client would probably be a great alternative if looking to control and view video remotely.