Introduction
Music daemon (musicd) is music player designed to run as a independent server where different frontend can connect to control the play or get information about what is playing etc.
Musicd supports plugins to enable playing of different audioformats. The plugin-api is quite similiar to one that the popular XMMS uses. Currently XMMS-plugins are not directly supported, but if I find the time, I'll make a meta-plugin to support them.
But why a server?
The first reason to make the player a server is to make it possible to use many different frontends and even at the same time. You can use a GUI if you like them, but anything it can do, can be done from commandline too.
The second reason is to make sure that the GUI or X does not crash the whole player. I have found that many software with a GUI tend to crash. With musicd the player is unaffected by this and you can just start the frontend again.
Features
Here is a small list of features musicd has, if you have any suggestions don't hesitate to tell me about them.
- Musicd has it's own simple text-based protocol for player-frontend communication.
- Support for unlimited number of playlists, songs per playlist and frontends connect at the same time
- Support for both IPv4 and IPv6. Also UNIX-sockets are supported for local connections.
- Currently supported audioformats: mp3 (ffmpeg), ogg vorbis (vorbisfile) and mods (libmikmod).
- Support for OSS and Solaris ouput.
- Musicd has been tested on x86 Linux and Solaris 9.
