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Install mpd + ncmpcpp on OSX Yosemite

Table of contents

1. Background
2. Installation

I had successful installation of mpd + ncmpcpp on Linux and OSX Mavericks. When I upgraded to Yosemite, I had this installed too, but on the exception that running mpd requires --no-daemon option. That was last year.

Early this year, I was forced to do a clean reformat and install of Yosemite. After setting up my local, here are the steps I did to sucessfuly install mpd + ncmpcpp on Yosemite without the --no-daemon option.

Background

1. mpd
   • Stands for Music Player Daemon.
   • From musicpd.org is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol.
   • Can be installed into Unix/Linux, OSX, and Windows.
     
2. ncmpcpp
   • Stands for NCurses Music Player Client (Plus Plus).
   • From wiki.archlinux.org is an mpd client (compatible with mopidy) with a UI very similar to ncmpc, but it provides new useful features such as support for regular expressions for library searches, extended song format, items filtering, the ability to sort playlists, and a local filesystem browser.
   • Website ncmpcpp.rybczak.net
   • Can be installed into Unix/Linux (Gentoo, Arch, FreeBSD, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, etc), and OSX.

Installation

1. Install mpd via homebrew

   brew install mpd
   

2. Install ncmpcpp

   brew install ncmpcpp
   

3. Create directories and files

   cd ~
   mkdir .mpd
   cd .mpd
   mkdir playlists
   touch mpd.conf
   touch mpd.db
   touch mpd.log
   touch mpd.pid
   touch mpdstate
   

   or you can execute all together

   cd ~ && mkdir .mpd && cd .mpd && mkdir playlists && touch mpd.conf mpd.db mpd.log mpd.pid mpdstate
   

4. Write conf file in mpd.conf

   music_directory         "~/Music"
   playlist_directory      "~/.mpd/playlists"
   db_file                 "~/.mpd/mpd.db"
   log_file                "~/.mpd/mpd.log"
   pid_file                "~/.mpd/mpd.pid"
   state_file              "~/.mpd/mpdstate"
   auto_update             "yes"
   auto_update_depth       "2"
   follow_outside_symlinks "yes"
   follow_inside_symlinks  "yes"
   
   audio_output {
       type                  "osx"
       name                  "CoreAudio"
       mixer_type            "software"
   }
   
   decoder {
       plugin                "mp4ff"
       enabled               "no"
   }
   
   bind_to_address         "127.0.0.1"
   port                    "6600"
       
   user                    "timothy"
   

   Change paths to your choice, and the user to what you get when you do whoami in your shell.

5. Finally, run mpd daemon

   mpd
   

   And, run ncmpcpp

   ncmpcpp
   

That’s it. I didn’t thought that installing it into Yosemite was that simple. Hope this helps.

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