How To Add MPD To The Ubuntu Sound Menu

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol. There are many MPD clients and if you want all the features you can imagine in a music player and the lightest solution for this you should give MPD + GMPC a try.

Adding MPD (and thus any MPD client) to the Ubuntu 10.10 Sound Menu is very easy thanks to Vsevolod Velichko who maintains a PPA for a package he created to add MPD to the Sound Menu.

The MPD Sound Menu integration is still very basic at this point but what's most important: it works! Here are some notes from the author:

• It will only work if your music is in (or linked to) /var/lib/mpd/music. In other cases it'll work in sound-menu, but it'll break MPRIS.
• For now you must start the application from the terminal (the first time only)

Vsevolod hopes he'll be able to make it reconnect MPD and be able to restart MPD from the sound menu as well as make the music library configurable but for now these are not available.

To install the MPD Sound Menu integration, use the following commands (for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat only - obviously since the menu has just been released in Maverick):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:torkvemada/torkvemada
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mpd-sound-menu

Once installed, enter the following command in a terminal:

mpd-sound-menu &

Many thanks to WebUpd8 reader Gnaag for the tip and all the info!