--- mpd, ncmpcdd, perl, CPAN and song ratings on OSX

mpd, ncmpcdd, perl, CPAN and song ratings on OSX

14/02/2017

Written by: Colin Yates

Hi there, been a while - so, buzzword bingo anyone ;-).

Having grown tired of the weight and cost of a GUI I am returning to my lighter-weight roots as much as possible. I can’t quite reproduce the fantastic experience of i3 on the mac but using terminal based apps is a good first step.

So, after experimenting with the excellent cmus I was sold on the convenience of terminal based music players (did I mention how fast these things are?!). However, cmus, whilst excellent had a few things that didn’t quite gel with me:

slightly inconsistent keyboard mappings
no way to navigate via tags
no way to rate songs and therefore noway to build dynamic play lists

The other great contender is mpd which is a music player daemon/server with a whole shedload of clients. The most popular one seems to be ncmpcpp.

Installing it was a breeze, follow this although ignore the instruction to create mpd.db otherwise mpd will complain of a corrupted DB.

After installing mpd and ncmpcpp it is time to use them. By far the best reference I have found for ncmpcpp is this cheat sheet.

So, great, except ncmpcpp doesn’t rate songs. The main contender for that seems to be a Perl module (“app?”): https://metacpan.org/release/Audio-MPD. I confess, despite over 20 years of professional software engineering I have managed to not touch Perl ;-). So, what do you do with a Perl thingy?

Turns out:

CPAN is the maven of the Perl world
cpan install <module> installs that library so Perl ‘apps’ can access it
a Perl ‘app’ is really just a shell script that uses the perl interpreter

With this knowledge, getting hold of mpd-dump-ratings and mpd-rate is as simple as:

configure cpan on your mac if you haven’t already by executing cpan
clone the github repo locally
cpan install AUDIO:MPD (analog of mvn install) installs the MPD library locally
run it again as it failed for me the first time :-)
in the bin directory of the github repo you cloned you can find mpd-dump-ratings,mpd-dynamic and mpd-rate

So, have a read through the documentation and link those 3 scripts to your local ~/bin directory (or whatever directory you have in your $PATH for just such a thing).

I am almost certainly doing something wrong and non-idiomatic and upgrades are, as ever, welcome.

That’s all for now folks - see you in another few months ;-).