For a long time, Linux had a reputation as not being suitable for multimedia applications because of a lack of appropriate codecs and applications. The tide has turned, and the package sources of most distributions contain more multimedia programs than many other operating systems. Almost every standard installation comes with audio players that play music files in all common formats. These programs usually only run locally on a desktop computer, where the audio files are also located. The players cannot be used on the web – or only to a very limited extent.

The Music Player Daemon (MPD) [1] lets users enjoy music far more flexibly and from any location: It acts as a music server on a standalone system or on the local network completely independent of the clients. On standalone systems, the advantages of MPD are less obvious than on the network, because the server and client run on the same machine and the function is thus similar to any conventional playback software for audio files. On your home network, for example, you can connect an MPD server to a hi-fi system and then control it with a notebook or smartphone. The streaming capabilities of the MPD server also let you play audio files on remote clients, if desired.

The MPD server can be found in the package sources of almost all major distributions, from Debian and Fedora to Mageia and from openSUSE to Slackware and Ubuntu. It can therefore be installed with just a few mouse clicks. However, configuring the service requires some manual work: As an administrative user, you will be concerned with the /etc/mpd.conf file, which you can open in an editor. This file groups all the important server settings.

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