Skip Banshee, Rhythmbox, Exaile – Use GMPC

Iv’e been using Banshee and Exaile most of my time in Linux, Rhythmbox is even less. But using them all long enough to get frustrated on them.

So I started today to look for alternative music players for Gnome environment in Linux. There is several applications out there, but usually they are too lite or built with java or similar.

So i found Gnome Media Player Client (GMPC).

To make it work, I needed mpd first. Compiled few times to make it use so many supporting files as possible. Ended up with this:
########### MPD CONFIGURATION ############

Client Support:
IPv6 support ………………enabled
TCP support ……………….enabled
Unix domain socket support ….enabled

Playback Support:
ALSA support ………………enabled
FIFO support ………………enabled
HTTP daemon support ………..enabled
JACK support ………………enabled
libao support ……………..enabled
OSS support ……………….enabled
PulseAudio support …………enabled
SHOUTcast support ………….enabled

Streaming Encoder Support:
LAME mp3 encoder …………..enabled
Ogg Vorbis encoder …………enabled

File Format Support:
AAC support ……………….enabled
FFMPEG support …………….enabled
FLAC support ………………enabled
MODPLUG support ……………enabled
MAD mp3 decoder support …….enabled
Musepack (MPC) support ……..enabled
OggFLAC support ……………enabled(FLAC 1.1.3)
Ogg Vorbis support …………enabled
using tremor……………..no
Wave file support ………….enabled
WavPack support ……………enabled

Streaming support:
libcurl support (streaming) …enabled
libmms support …………….enabled

Other features
ID3 tag support ……………enabled
libsamplerate support ………enabled
Zeroconf support …………..avahi

##########################################

Quite happy to get so many things enabled.

Now it’s time to get anything isntalled, open up terminal inside your Foresight Linux and write:

sudo conary update {gmpc,mpd,gmpc-plugins}=@fl:2-devel

That’s not all, we need to create a config file for mpd. So it knows where your music files are located and that we want to use pulse audio for it.

First we need to create the folders, open terminal and write:

mkdir -p ~/.mpd/playlists

open Gedit or something similar, and add this inside it:

port “6600″

music_directory “~/Musik”

playlist_directory ”~/.mpd/playlists”

db_file “~/.mpd/mpd.db”

log_file ”~/.mpd/mpd.log”

audio_output {

type ”pulse”

name ”My MPD PulseAudio Output”

#server ”localhost” # optional

#sink ”alsa_output” # optional

}