[HOWTO] Mplayer music daemon

Question

Hello fellow Archers,
I recently noticed that XMMS2 was using 40% of my CPU (not sure how I missed it but it no doubt has something to do with my setup) and decided I needed to correct this. My plan was to initially write my own music server, but that turned out to just be a pain in the ass considering how many formats mplayer supports, so here is my solution.
This setup consists of a few tiny scripts put together to form a very *minimalist* music daemon.
To start, you should create a directory named ".musicd" under your home directory, then run "mkfifo ~/.musicd/control" to create the control pipe.
Now on to the scripts,
The first is "musicd", it is a shell script that looks as follows:
while true; do mplayer -input file=${HOME}/.musicd/control -af pan=1:0.5:0.5 -quiet -playlist ${HOME}/.musicd/playlist | songinfo; sleep 1; done &
This takes care of running mplayer and making sure it can be communicated with. The "-af pan=1:0.5:0.5" can be removed, I use this to down-mix everything to mono for my crappy sound setup.
The second is actually a tiny C program, that could no doubt be implement using common unix tools but I didn't really bother tying:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
int main()
char artist[128];
char title[128];
char buffer[128];
char path[128];
snprintf(path, 128, "%s/.musicd/current", getenv("HOME"));
while (!feof(stdin)) {
fgets(buffer, 128, stdin);
buffer[strlen(buffer)-1] = '\0';
if (!strncmp(" Title:", buffer, 7)) {
strncpy(title, buffer + 8, 128);
} else if (!strncmp(" Artist:", buffer, 8)) {
strncpy(artist, buffer + 9, 128);
FILE *fp = fopen(path, "w");
if (fp) {
fprintf(fp, "%s - %s", artist, title);
fclose(fp);
This program can be compiled with "gcc -o songinfo songinfo.c" and placed somewhere in your path. It simply takes mplayers output and listens for the "Title:" and "Artist:" sections and writes it to a file for use in status bars etc.
Technically this is all you need for it to run now, and you can even start the musicd script if you wish. However for it to be useful you will probably want to make use of the next script. Also it might pay to create a playlist before running mplayer or it will sit there looping and looking ugly, but that is up to you
locate -i "$*" | grep -E 'mp3|ogg|wma|m4a|wmv|avi|mpg|ogm$' > ${HOME}/.musicd/playlist
echo "stop" > ${HOME}/.musicd/control
echo "loadlist ${HOME}/.musicd/playlist" > ${HOME}/.musicd/control
Save this somewhere in your path as "play". If you have started the musicd script it should actually be functional now, if you type "play artist" then locate should find the files and load them into mplayer and it should start playing
As a bonus, I've made this neat little script utilizing dmenu to let you quickly select recently used entries:
HISTORY_FILE="${HOME}/.playhist"
SELECTION=`cat $HISTORY_FILE | dmenu -p What\? -i -nb black -nf grey40 -sb grey10 -sf grey80 -fn "-*-proggyclean-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"`
if [ -n "$SELECTION" ]; then
echo $SELECTION | cat - $HISTORY_FILE | sort | uniq -i > $HISTORY_FILE
exec play $SELECTION
fi
Save that one as whatever you like, and bind to a key using your window manager configuration or xbindkeys
Now you're done! You may also want to set up scripts or aliases to send pause or stop commands to mplayer as well but that should be trivial if you got this far.
Also if you want to see the song that is playing you can just use "cat ~/.musicd/current".
Oh and one more thing, using mplayer has the added advantage that you can play a video playlist in the same way as you would for music, or switch between the two easily
If you have any questions please ask!
Edit: Using snprintf, and removed -idle from mplayer launch line to enable playlists to repeat
Last edited by HashBox (2009-05-28 00:11:30)

Answer 1

brisbin33 wrote:
anubis2591 wrote:
brisbin33 wrote:updating the mpd db is so time consuming it makes it useless to me
The most useful mpc command I use:
mpc update [directory goes here]
So just use that to update only your systemlink.
hmm, maybe i'm a little confused; what's the difference b/w mpd create-db and mpc update? i always do both whenever i add new music to the collection.
/edit i'm thinking create-db recreates the db in it's entirety and mpc update will just update changes or a specific folder if passed... this is useful information, thanks.
if you're correct (i assume you are) then mpc-play is my new best friend
Yeah, mpd create-db takes forever because it goes from scratch. mpc update updates the whole db and then mpc update Directory\ Name updates/adds only that directory. Amazingly useful if you add music as much as I do.