mpdev is a music player daemon event watcher. It connects to the mpd socket and uses mpd's idle command to listen for player events. Whenever an event occurs, mpdev can carry out various activities using user defined hooks. The idea for doing mpdev comes from mpdcron. Currently mpdev runs on linux and Mac OSX. For Linux you have binary package which mostly automates the installation and setup. For Mac OSX, one needs to manually compile, install and configure things like startup, configure environment variables, creating the sqlite3 database.
mpdev helps in bulding a database of your played tracks. Along with a script mpdplaylist, it can generate a playlist for mpd as per your taste and mood.
You can create scripts in $HOME/.mpdev directory. The default installation installs two scripts player and playpause in $HOME/.mpdev directory for uid 1000. The scripts are adequate for most use cases. The player script does the following
-
scrobbles titles to last.fm and libre.fm. You have to create API keys by running lastfm-scrobbler and librefm-scrobbler one time. You can disable scrobbling by setting DISABLE_SCROBBLE environment variable.
-
updates play counts in the sqlite stats.db. You could write your own script and update any external database.
-
Synchronizes the ratings in the sticker (sqlite). You could write your own script and update any external database. You can also automatically rate songs to some default value by setting an environment variable AUTO_RATING by creating a file $HOME/.mpdev/AUTO_RATING. If you are using supervise from deamontools (more on that below), creating an environment variable is very easy. e.g. To have an environment variable AUTO_RATING with value 6, you just need to have a file name AUTO_RATING in /service/mpdev/variables. The file should just have 6 as the content.
-
Update the song's karma. Karma is a number ranging from 0 to 100. If a song is skipped, it's karma is downgraded by 1. Karma can be downgraded only for songs rated less than 6 and played 5 times or less and whose karma is 50 or less. If a song is played twice within a day, it's karma is upgraded by 4. If a song is played twice within a week, it's karma is upgraded by 3. If a song is played twice within 14 days, its karma is upgraded by 2. If a song is played twice within a month, it's karma is upgraded by 1. All songs start with a default karma of 50. A song earns a permanent karma if any of the below happen
- it's karma becomes 60 or more.
- has been rated 6 or greater.
- has been played from beginning to end for more than 5 times.
The above four are actually done by running a hook, a script named player in $HOME/.mpdev directory. You can put your own script named player in this directory. In fact mpdev can run specific hooks for specific types of mpd events. A hook can be any executable program or script. It will be passed arguments and have certain environment variables related to the song being played, available to it. Below is a list of of events and corresponding hooks that will be executed if available.
| MPD EVENT | Hook script |
|---|---|
| SONG_CHANGE | ~/.mpdev/player |
| PLAY/PAUSE | ~/.mpdev/playpause |
| STICKER_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/sticker |
| MIXER_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/mixer |
| OPTIONS_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/options |
| OUTPUT_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/output |
| UPDATE_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/update |
| DATABASE_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/database |
| PLAYLIST_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/playlist |
| STORED_PLAYLIST_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/stored_playlist |
| PARTITION_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/partition |
| SUBSCRIPTION_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/subscription |
| MESSAGE_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/message |
| MOUNT_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/mount |
| NEIGHBOUR_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/neighbour |
| CUSTOM_EVENT | ~/.mpdev/custom |
The hooks are passed the following arguments
mpd-event - Passed when the above events listed (apart from SONG_CHANGE) happen.
player-event - Passed when you play or pause song
playlist-event - Passed when the playlist changes
now-playing - Passed when a song starts playing
end-song - Passed when a song finishes playing
The default installation makes a copy of /usr/libexec/mpdev/player and /usr/libexec/mpdev/playpause in $HOME/.mpdev for the user with uid 1000. The player script inserts or updates songs in the stat.db, sticker.db sqlite database when a song gets played. For bulk inserts, updates, deletion, the mpdev package also comes with mpdev_update(1) and mpdev_cleanup(1) programs that help in maintaining stats.db, sticker.db sqlite databases. This two programs use SQL Transactions and are extremely fast and takes just a few seconds to create/update the stats.db, sticker.db sqlite databases. You can disable all database updates by the player script, by setting NO_DB_UPDATE environment variable. In such a case, the player script will just print information about the song being played and actions like pause, stop, play. The default installation also makes a copy of /usr/libexec/mpdev/output and /usr/libexec/mpdev/mixer in $HOME/mpdev. At the moment, these scripts just print information of the state of output devices and the volume level. You can edit them if you can think of something useful. If you are installing mpdev from the Open Build Service repository, the mpdev sevice will automatically update these scripts if they change in the package. If you don't want auto-udpate you can create an override file. e.g. If you create a file $HOME/.mpdev/.player.nooverwrite, the script $HOME/.mpdev/player will never be replaced with a newer script from the binary package.
Example 1. create stats.db in the current directory
$ time mpdev_update -S -j -t -D 0 -d stats.db
Processed 42630 rows, Failures 0 rows, Updated 42636 rows
real 0m0.830s
user 0m0.405s
sys 0m0.096s
Example 2. Update stats.db in the current directory to add new songs
$ time mpdev_update -S -j -t -D 0 -d stats.db
Processed 42636 rows, Failures 0 rows, Updated 6 rows
real 0m0.725s
user 0m0.353s
sys 0m0.067s
| Environment variable | Description |
|---|---|
| SONG_ID | Set to the ID of song in mpd database |
| SONG_URI | Set to the full path of the music file |
| SONG_TITLE | Set to the title of the song |
| SONG_ARTIST | Set to the song artist |
| SONG_ALBUM | Set to the song album |
| SONG_DATE | Set to the Date tag of the song |
| SONG_GENRE | Set to the Genre tag of the song |
| SONG_TRACK | Set to the track number of the song |
| SONG_DURATION | Set to the song duration |
| SONG_PLAYED_DURATION | Set to the duration for which the song was played |
| ELAPSED_TIME | Total time elapsed within the current song in seconds, but with higher resolution |
| SONG_POSITION | Set to position of the current song |
| SONG_LAST_MODIFIED | Set to the last modified time of the song |
| START_TIME | Time at which the song play started |
| END_TIME | Time at which the song ended |
| PLAYER_STATE | Set when you pause/resume player |
| DURATION | Set to song duration as a floating point number |
| SCROBBLER_LASTFM | Set to 1 if tracks are getting scrobbled to lastfm. Will not be set if DISABLE_SCROBBLE environment variable is set. |
| SCROBBLER_LIBREFM | Set to 1 if tracks are getting scrobbled to librefm. Will not be set if DISABLE_SCROBBLE environment variable is set. |
| OUTPUT_CHANGED | Set when you enable or disable any output devices. This indicates the new state of an output device. |
| VOLUME | Set during startup and when you change mixer volume. This indicates the volume level as a percentage. |
| VERBOSE | Verbose level of mpdev |
Apart from the above environment variables, the state of all output device are available as environment variable to the script ~/.mpdev/output. Below example is for a case where three devices listed in /etc/mpd.conf - (Piano DAC Plus 2.1 with ID 0, Xonar EssenceOne with ID 1 and Scarlett 2i2 USB with ID 2). e.g. To check if the first device is enabled, you can just query the environment variable OUTPUT_0_STATE. Whenever the state of any output device is changed (enabled or disabled), the script ~/.mpdev/output gets called with access to the following environment variables.
OUTPUT_0_ID=0
OUTPUT_0_NAME=Piano DAC Plus 2.1
OUTPUT_0_STATE=enabled
OUTPUT_1_ID=1
OUTPUT_1_NAME=Xonar EssenceOne
OUTPUT_1_STATE=disabled
OUTPUT_2_ID=2
OUTPUT_2_NAME=Scarlett 2i2 USB
OUTPUT_2_STATE=disabled
If you create the stats database, mpdev will update the last_played field, play_count fields in stats db. It will also update the song rating that you choose for the song. The ability to rate songs in mpd can be enabled by having the sticker_file keyword uncommented in /etc/mpd.conf. You will also need a mpd client that uses the mpd sticker command. One such player is cantata, which is available for all linux distros and Mac OSX.
The sticker database can be enabled by having the followinng entry in /etc/mpd.conf
#
# The location of the sticker database. This is a database which
# manages dynamic information attached to songs.
#
sticker_file "/var/lib/mpd/sticker.db"
#
You need to restart mpdev for the new environment variables to be available to mpdev. To restart the mpdev daemon, you then just need to run the following command svc -r /service/mpdev. Below are few operations to stop, start and restart mpdev.
$ sudo svc -d /service/mpdev # this stops the mpdev daemon
$ sudo svc -u /service/mpdev # this starts the mpdev daemon
$ sudo svc -r /service/mpdev # this stops and restarts the mpdev daemon
If you do a source install and want to have mpdev started by supervise you need to do the following
$ sudo apt-get install daemontools
$ sudo ./create_service --servicedir=/service --servicedir=/service \
--user=1000 --add-service
If you want mpdev to print song information to a LCD display on a remote
host running lcdDaemon
$ sudo ./create_service --servicedir=/service --servicedir=/service \
--user=1000 --lcdhost=IP --lcdport=1806 --add-service
If you want to do a source install and not have the supervise to run mpdev daemon, you could write a simple script and call it in a rc script during boot. If you don't use supervise, you need some knowledge of shell scripting. A very simple example of such a script is below. Another problem of not using supervise will be that you will have to enable your script to be called in some rc or systemd script whenever your machine is started.
#!/bin/sh
while true
do
env HOME=/home/pi \
MPDEV_TMPDIR=/tmp/mpdev \
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/home/pi \
PATH=\$PATH:/usr/bin:/bin \
AUTO_RATING=6 \
/usr/bin/mpdev -v
sleep 1
done
The stats database can be created running the mpdev_update program or by running sqlite3 program using the following SQL script.
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS song(
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
play_count INTEGER DEFAULT 0,
rating INTEGER DEFAULT 0,
uri TEXT UNIQUE NOT NULL,
duration INTEGER,
last_modified INTEGER,
date_added INTEGER DEFAULT (strftime('%s','now')),
artist TEXT,
album TEXT,
title TEXT,
track TEXT,
name TEXT,
genre TEXT,
date TEXT,
composer TEXT,
performer TEXT,
disc TEXT,
last_played INTEGER,
karma INTEGER NOT NULL CONSTRAINT karma_percent CHECK (karma >= 0 AND karma <= 100) DEFAULT 50
);
CREATE INDEX rating on song(rating);
CREATE INDEX uri on song(uri);
CREATE INDEX last_played on song(last_played);
CREATE INDEX date_added on song(date_added);
CREATE INDEX last_modified on song(last_modified);
To use lastfm-scrobbler, librefm-scrobbler, you need to have your own last.fm API keys. Once you have created your API keys, you can view the same at the api accounts page.
The scrobbler modules lastfm-scrobbler, librefm-scrobbler enables scrobbling to last.fm and libre.fm and can be enabled by running lastfm-scrobbler and librefm-scrobbler once as shown below
$ lastfm-scrobbler --connect --api_key="abc123" --api_sec="xyz890"
$ librefm-scrobbler --connect --api_key="abc123" --api_sec="xyz890"
As you can see above, the same key generated for lastfm can be used for librefm.
After you have added the connection you should have lastfm-scrobbler.conf file in ~/.config/lastfm-scrobbler and librefm-scrobbler.conf file in ~/.config/librefm-scrobbler. These two files will have your SESSION_KEY, API_KEY and API_SEC. lastfm-scrobbler and librefm-scrobbler are a copy of moc-scrobbler from https://gitlab.com/pachanka/moc-scrobbler. moc-scrobbler is distributed under the terms of MIT License. mpdev will not do scrobbling if the SESSION_KEY, API_KEY and API_SEC haven't been setup, or if the environment variable DISABLE_SCROBBLE is set
By default mpdev will get the host name and port for mpd from MPD_HOST and MPD_PORT environment variables. MPD_PASSWORD environment variable can be set to make mpdev connect to a password-protected mpd. If these environment variables aren’t set, mpdev connects to localhost on port 6600.. You can look at the logs while your songs are playing using tail -f /var/log/svc/mpdev/current
Take a look at BuildRequires field in mpdev.spec and Build-Depends field in debian/mpdev.dsc
mpdev uses library from libqmail. If you are building mpdev from source, you need to install libqmail.
$ cd /usr/local/src
$ git clone --no-tags --no-recurse-submodules --depth=1 https://github.com/mbhangui/libqmail
$ cd libqmail
$ ./default.configure
$ make && sudo make install-strip
$ ./configure --prefix=$prefix --libexecdir=$prefix/libexec/mpdev
$ make
$ sudo make install
This is done by running the create_rpm / create_debian scripts. (Here version refers to the existing version of mpdev package)
$ pwd
/usr/local/src/mpdev
$ ./create_rpm
$ ls -l $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/mpdev\*
-rw-rw-r--. 1 mbhangui mbhangui 290567 Feb 8 09:05 mpdev-0.1-1.1.fc31.x86_64.rpm
$ pwd
/usr/local/src/mpdev
$ ./create_debian
$ ls -l $HOME/stage/mpdev*
-rw-r--r-- 1 mbhangui mbhangui 558 Jul 2 19:30 mpdev.1-1.1_amd64.buildinfo
-rw-r--r-- 1 mbhangui mbhangui 981 Jul 2 19:30 mpdev.1-1.1_amd64.changes
-rw-r--r-- 1 mbhangui mbhangui 2916 Jul 2 19:30 mpdev.1-1.1_amd64.deb
Prebuilt binaries using openSUSE Build Service are available for mpdev for
- Debian (including ARM images for Debian 10 which work (and tested) for RaspberryPI (model 2,3 & 4) and Debian 9 for Allo Sparky)
- Raspbian 10 and 11 for RaspberryPI (ARM images)
- openSUSE Tumbleweed (x86_64)
- Arch Linux (x86_64)
- Fedora (x86_64)
- Ubuntu (x86_64 and ARM images for BananaPI)
Use the below url for installation
https://software.opensuse.org//download.html?project=home%3Ambhangui%3Araspi&package=mpdev
debian/ubuntu repositories already has daemontools and ucspi-tcp which are far behind in terms of feature list that the indimail-mta repo provides. When you install mpdev, apt-get may pull the wrong version with limited features. Also apt-get install mpdev will get installed with errors, leading to an incomplete setup. You need to ensure that the two packages get installed from the indimail-mta repository instead of the debian repository. If you don't do this, mpdev will not function correctly as it depends on setting of proper global envirnoment variables. Global environment variabels are not supported by daemontools from the official debian repository. Additionally, the official ucspi-tcp package from the debian repository doesn't support TLS, which will result in services that depend on TLS not functioning.
All you need to do is set a higher preference for the indimail-mta repository by creating /etc/apt/preferences.d/preferences with the following contents
$ sudo /bin/bash
# cat > /etc/apt/preferences.d/preferences <<EOF
Package: *
Pin: origin download.opensuse.org
Pin-Priority: 1001
EOF
You can verify this by doing
$ apt policy daemontools ucspi-tcp
daemontools:
Installed: 2.11-1.1+1.1
Candidate: 2.11-1.1+1.1
Version table:
1:0.76-7 500
500 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian buster/main armhf Packages
*** 2.11-1.1+1.1 1001
1001 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/indimail/Debian_10 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
ucspi-tcp:
Installed: 2.11-1.1+1.1
Candidate: 2.11-1.1+1.1
Version table:
1:0.88-6 500
500 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian buster/main armhf Packages
*** 2.11-1.1+1.1 1001
1001 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/indimail/Debian_10/ Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status