I was getting tired of the bloat and memory usage of Rhythmbox, so I was searching for a new music player/manager. After trying Muine and Decibel and not being totally satisfied, I finally (re)found MPD, the Music Player Daemon.
Once I figured out how to set it up (not too hard, but more work than usual), it’s been my favorite application for playing music. While GUI clients exist, I’ve been enjoying the command-line client MPC, as I can do things like this:
1 | mpc listall | grep Sigur | mpc add |
…which greps my whole music library for files with “Sigur” in the title, then adds them to the current playlist.
I also wanted to set up some key combos, so I didn’t have to execute commands in a terminal all the time. I used XBindKeys to bind some keys to mpc commands. For instance, the following commands toggles play/pause status (with Ctrl + the multimedia play button), skips to the next song (with Ctrl + multimedia next button), stops playback (with Ctrl + Alt + multimedia play button), and shows the currently playing song in a notification window (with Super + multimedia play button):
1 2 3 | "mpc toggle" m:0x14 + c:172 Control+Mod2 + XF86AudioPlay |
1 2 3 | "mpc next" m:0x14 + c:171 Control+Mod2 + XF86AudioNext |
1 2 3 | "mpc stop" m:0x1c + c:172 Control+Alt+Mod2 + XF86AudioPlay |
1 2 3 | "notify-send -u normal "$(mpc current)"" m:0x50 + c:172 Mod2+Mod4 + XF86AudioPlay |
And what about memory usage? It’s currently playing a song and only using 8Mb. For comparison, I just fired up Rhythmbox and while idle it uses 47Mb.