Putzing around last Sunday, I decided to give MPD a try. I store all my MP3 files on my desktop computer, which runs Ubuntu and I’ve wanted to be able to control music playback on that machine from my laptop, wherever I happen to be lazing about at home.

I had a bit of a hard time getting MPD set up, working and compiling a database. The main issue was file permissions, but once I got that hammered out, installed MPC so I could run commands, it worked nicely.

However, I much prefer a GUI to manage music, so I hunted around for a front-end for MPD. I first tried gmpc, which worked fine. But, I need support for last.fm and to handle this with with gmpc, you have to compile a plugin, which was a huge bitch.

While trying to get through the plugin compile, I stumbled on Sonata, which seemed popular and well regarded and contains built-in support for last.fm. Also, it’s in the Ubuntu repositories, which is a big plus for me. So, I dropped gmpc and gave it a try.

Sonata works well, it displays album art and all that fun stuff, but doesn’t have the smart playlists that I’ve grown used to with Amarok and exaile, which were two programs I’ve loved and relied on in the past. Truth told, it’s low on features, but so are most MPD front-ends. It works, though. It handles last.fm and doesn’t look too fugly. I’m going to stick with it for a while and see how it goes, since I really like being able to run a central music server. But, if there’s a better front-end out there, I’d like to know about it.

Bang for buck, Amarok is the best music player/library manager on earth. But lately, since I’ve been flying Gnome, Xfce and other non-KDE-native environments, I’ve been using Exaile, just for the heck of it. It’s also nice to not have to load KDE libraries, just to play some music. Anyway, Exaile a good program. It’s come a damn long stretch since I first checked it out. It can handle large libraries and with every realease, closes the gap on features that make Amarok the best.

I’ve been using exaile, pretty much exclusively for about a year or more now. I’m not sure what took me so long but I just now ran ‘exaile –help‘ and got the command line arguments. Why didn’t I do this a year ago? I love command line music control. I don’t know if they’re any better, but to me, it’s always much more satisfying to execute tasks via command. Managing my playlist via command line makes it uber.

Usage: exaile.py [option...|uri]

Options:
-h, –help show this help message and exit
-d DIR, –duplicates=DIR
Finds and deletes all duplicate tracks (based on their
md5 sum)
-n, –next Play the next track
-p, –prev Play the previous track
-s, –stop Stop playback
-a, –play Play
-t, –play-pause Toggle Play or Pause
-q, –query Query player
–gui-query Show a popup of the currently playing track
–get-title Print the title of current track
–get-album Print the album of current track
–get-artist Print the artist of current track
–get-length Print the length of current track
–current-position Print the position inside the current track as a
percentage
-i VOL, –increase_vol=VOL
Increases the volume by VOL
-l VOL, –decrease_vol=VOL
Decreases the volume by VOL
–play-cd Start playing a CD
–new Start new instance
–set-rating=RATING Set rating for current song
–get-rating Get rating for current song
–settings=SETTINGS Settings Directory
–cleanversion
–version
–testing
–no-equalizer Disable Equalizer support
–start-minimized Start Exaile minimized to tray, if possible

Awesome. For me, at least.