Support for non-Spotify local music with Music Player Daemon

[bonelifer]

Would love to see an non-Spotify version that uses MPD(Music Player Daemon)/myMPD to get the info/artwork.

[twij]

Started looking at this using a local HTTP server to retrieve the MPRIS data for what is currently playing. Got it somewhat working okay with a few bugs. This is Linux only AFAIK but there are similar APIs on other systems. It should work for MPD or pretty much any other player or even Firefox/Chrome for video thumbnails etc.

Unfortunately most of my music files don't contain album art metadata (this might depend where you source your music, but if it's from your own CDs then they probably don't unless you put it there). I have worked around this by attempting to grab the artwork from the Musicbrainz API, which works okay as long as your music taste isn't too weird.

However - I'm not entirely sure running a HTTP server on the PC side all the time is the best idea as far as security or efficiency goes.

The other thing I was thinking is that the font is kinda ugly right now. If we have the power of a PC then maybe we could create an extra image with some title/artist/whatever text on it and send both instead.

Not sure how these ideas fit with the goal of this app in particular though, just seemed like a good modular starting point.

[bonelifer]

For CD's I use fr:ac which uses MusicBrainz/CAA. For others I use deemix, which also has album art. Though I run deemix music through Picard to get MBid's. I then run custom album art scripts over them that dumps albumart from the mp3 as cover..jpg(only accepting the higher resolution if one already exists in the filesystem), strips AA from the mp3, gathers as a source of truth in this chain: Apple Music, MB/CAA, Deezer, LastFM, all of them respect an already higher resolution AA. Reduces greater than 1400 to 1400. Applies JPG 90 compression(compares input to reduced to only keep the smaller file). You can get the filesystem cover.jpg from the mpd client.

[twij]

I've pushed my progress to my fork, it's functional but I will improve it more over the weekend if I have time. For MPD you might need to use something like this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Music_Player_Daemon/Tips_and_tricks#mpd-mpris - I'm not completely sure, I use Musikcube.

I have switched the server to https and added caching/etags so that the polling should be light. I noticed one of the other forks is working on adding WebSockets which would be superior. Hopefully we will hear from @fatihak about any future plans as to whether there will be a server side added for sending data back and forth. If there is then I will swap to whatever they are planning. For now though this is probably good enough for my use. If I have time then I can probably add a specific MPD version, which doesn't need MPRIS at some point.

If your files are in good shape then it should work well. I did notice that some less legitimately sourced files often don't have any artwork or use the cover metadata as "proof" that they own the CD, which doesn't look so great. Also weirdly FLAC from legit sources (bandcamp etc) often doesn't seem to have it either.

[bonelifer]

You can use an mpris client for MPD, but you could just create a python3 daemon service that listens for MPD idle events, using python-mpd2. This would be light on resources on the MPD server(as it spends most of its time doing nothing) and could then report back to the WebSockets on the Presto. Mind you I'm not a programmer, just a bash script jockey who uses the Winamp Llama whipping power to make AI do my bidding.

[twij]

Well I will wait and see if the other fork working on WebSockets gets merged. I think MPRIS is probably better anyway as it supports pretty much everything that plays media on Linux (as well as KDEConnect etc), and should be trivial to adapt to Windows and macOS too which should cover most desktop to Presto scenarios.

[vwillcox]

I've created one I use with MPD in my repos - not going to spam so just reach out