thanks for the tip! I installed Minion and was a bit confused at first when I didn’t find any UI for the plugin and the documentation was a bit meager.

However, after finding the new menu item and the controls in the bottom right corner, I have to say that I’m starting to like Minion. It seems to lack a playlist search and queue functionality, which would really make my day as I’ve usually got my whole library in the playlist and the player on shuffle. On the other hand, I have a feeling that those features are quite rare among other MPD clients as well.

Otherwise it’s quite snappy and makes MPD even more ubiquitous.

I’ve been reading your post about mpd just AFTER making it working for me (after a deep research in alternatives, like xmms2).

For me, the best client solution is MINION, a firefox plugin.
So, if you use a Mac, there is a Firefox for mac, either Windows, either Linux… Same solution for every platform…

Thanks for sharing your experiences… If you need a howto Ubuntu server + mpd (in spanish), just mail me.

See you, (and excuse my poor, bad and long forgotten english).

glad to hear that my thoughts about mpd can make you go out and support Finnish industry by buying a Nokia N810 :) Feel free to share your experiences later on.

For anyone’s information, I’ve found a better client to OS X – Theremin. It’s much more feature rich than MpcOSX and perfect for my needs. In fact, it has almost completely dethrown RelaxxPlayer due to it’s responsiveness.

I also installed an ncurses-based client – ncpmc – locally on the media machine. So now I can control the music at home from anywhere over ssh (even using my Nokia E66 ;)

I’ve had it in my head for quite some time that it sure would be nice to have my music server, which is connected to the amp, be playable from a web-based client. The goal being a good enough reason to go out and buy a Nokia N810. I believe that you might have given me the reason! Thanks for the great write-up. When I get the pieces in place I’ll let you know how things work out.

Many thanks,
Gordon

thanks for the compliment on the photos, I guess most people have become used to me running around with my camera and just don’t care that much anymore. Or then it’s the alcohol ;)

Anyway, I don’t have any solution to your mpd without LAN problem up my sleeve, but I’ve experimented with some other solutions (not involving mpd) before this present one. Specifically, I was trying out this Sony’s audio bluetooth transceiver (google around for HWS-BTA2W). It hooks up to an amplifier with a normal 3,5mm audio cable and receives the audio signal from any device supporting the A2DP protocol. In my case, my MacBook was able to recognize the transceiver as a “Bluetooth headset” (or similar) and happily streamed the music via the transceiver to my amplifier.

Using this technique, the music naturally has to be played on your laptop, which makes the music server kind of superfluous. Also, I had some problems with the transceiver’s poor range and choppy connection, but you might have better luck.

If you want to stick to mpd, you could always just hook your music server up to a WLAN router (with a short cable, and hide the router behind the server or smth) and have your laptop communicate over that. This is also my current setup. Compared to bluetooth, the WLAN connection allows me to move freely with my laptop in my flat.

Other than that, I’m afraid I don’t really have any ideas on how to create an “audio ad hoc netowrk” with bluetooth.

Forgot to mention, don’t have a home network at present of any description and cannot see a reason for me to need one except for this latest music server project (possibly). Basically don’t want to run a wire between my laptop “remote control” and the music server as it would be nice to “lounge” with my laptop not connected to anything. I want to plug a bluetooth dongle into the usb port of of my laptop and one into the usb port of the flac server to achieve point to point ad-hoc “network”. Right now listeneing to sonata play the Beatles day in the life from MPD on the same machine, working perfectly. I’m very impressed with the simplicity of it all!

PS - had a look at your photo albums also and congratulations on some lovely photos, you seem to be able to capture the moment very naturally! The scenery and occasion seems very similar to what we might get up to here in NZ.

To be precise, my music files resides on my web server, which my music server mounts, but in practice it makes no difference.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish with bluetooth here. With mpd, there’s no need to use bluetooth as the components communicate over LAN. Of course, this requires your music server to be connected to your LAN in the first place. If it isn’t, then you actually may have some difficulties with the mpd client and daemon running on different machines.

Ta,
Rob Collins
New Zealand