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.

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 Homebrew. Run brew install gstreamer and then brew install pygobject3.
  • On Linux, you need to install GStreamer 1.0 and the GObject bindings for python. Under Ubuntu, they are called python-gi and gstreamer1.0.
  • On Windows, you may want to try GStreamer WinBuilds (caveat emptor: I haven’t tried this).

You will also need the various GStreamer plugin packages to make everything work. See the Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin documentation for more information on installing GStreamer plugins.

Usage

To use the bpd plugin, first enable it in your configuration (see Using Plugins). 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:

  • Linux: gmpc, Sonata
  • Mac: Theremin
  • Windows: I don’t know. Get in touch if you have a recommendation.
  • iPhone/iPod touch: 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!

Configuration

To configure the plugin, make a bpd: section in your configuration file. The available options are:

  • host: Default: Bind to all interfaces.
  • port: Default: 6600
  • password: Default: No password.
  • volume: Initial volume, as a percentage. Default: 100

Here’s an example:

bpd:
    host: 127.0.0.1
    port: 6600
    password: seekrit
    volume: 100

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.

Saved playlists:

  • playlistclear
  • playlistdelete
  • playlistmove
  • playlistadd
  • playlistsearch
  • listplaylist
  • listplaylistinfo
  • playlistfind
  • rm
  • save
  • load
  • rename

Deprecated:

  • playlist
  • volume