Gnome Music Player Client (GMPC) 0.20 Released

GMPC is a GTK2 frontend for Music Player Daemon (MPD). Although its name may suggest otherwise, GMPC does not depend on any Gnome library. It runs on most platforms available (Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows). Using GMPC you can control the music in MPD's database. Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music but contrary to what some believe, many people run both MPD and GMPC (or other MPD fronends) on the same computer.

GMPC 0.20 was just released today and it comes with some nice new features:

• Humanity icon theme
• A pixbuf cache. Avoid loading image at the same size twice, and reloading images.
• Async loading/scaling off images from the hard-disk.
• Async mpd query handler. Loads data over a separate connection.
• Copy message to clipboard button.
• Use load command to make mpd load remote playlists (mpd 0.16 only)
• Update now playing look.
• Support for showing and setting 'raw image data'. This makes a plugin that reads embedded image possible.
• Make HTML text correctly display. (Converting to utf8)
• Do no close the popup, when mouse over.
• Remember previous path in file-selectors.
• Add quick-playlist-add menu to favorite button.
• Add 'search-as-you-type' option to search.
• Support easy-command via gmpc-remote
• Allow to jump to metadata browser from now playing.

More on GMPC 0.20, HERE.

So why exactly is GMPC + MPD so great? Here is a screenshot to understand better:

As you can see, GMPC 0.20 uses exactly 7MB of RAM with my 33,595 songs music collection database. Enabling all the plugins and toggling the interface to the 'Now Playing' view increases the memory usage to 12.7 MB but I still find that pretty amazing.

GMPC also comes with lots of plugins: alarm, album view, AWN applet, dynamic playlist, fullscreen info, jamendo, last.fm, libnotify, lirc, lyrdb, lyricsplugin, lyricwiki, magnatune, wikipedia info, taglib (for editing tags) and so on.


We've already covered GMPC main features as well as setting it up so I'm not going to post that again:

• GMPC + MPD review and installation instructions (including an Ubuntu PPA repository)
  
• If you don't have MPD set up, see also this post

Please note that the repository at the above GMPC link doesn't have the latest 0.20 final version yet (but it should be available really soon). There is also a stable GMPC PPA which might get the latest 0.20 version soon.


Download GMPC 0.20 source packages and Windows binaries from HERE.