Music Player Daemon

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music, designed to be controlled by various client applications over a network. Created by Warren Dukes in 2003 and maintained by Max Kellermann and the MPD community, MPD has over 2,200 stars as of 2026 and is the most popular open-source music daemon for Linux. Key features include: client-server architecture (MPD runs as a background daemon managing the music collection and playback, while any number of clients connect via TCP, local socket, or IPC for control), audio format support (FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, MP3, AAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MOD, SPC, and FFmpeg-based decoding for virtually all audio formats), audio output backends (ALSA, PulseAudio, PipeWire, OSS, JACK, PipeWire, sndio, HTTP streaming, and shoutcast/Icecast streaming), playlist management (stored playlists in m3u and XSPF formats, queue management, shuffle, repeat, and single-track modes), music database (configurable music directory with recursive scanning, metadata extraction via tags, and incremental database updates), tag-based browsing (browsing by artist, album, genre, date, composer, performer, and custom tags with filtering), sticker database (per-song, per-album, and per-artist key-value storage for ratings, play counts, and custom metadata), output configuration (multiple simultaneous outputs with per-output volume control and configurable resampling), HTTP streaming (streaming playback to other devices and software via HTTP), audio resampling (configurable sample rate conversion via libsamplerate or internal resampler), replay gain (track and album replay gain normalization for consistent volume), proxy mode (connecting to remote MPD instances and proxying commands), and client ecosystem (over 50 clients including ncmpcpp, Cantata, GMPC, Ario, Mpdroid, MALP, and web-based clients like ympd and myMPD).