Playing Music on your Fedora Terminal with MPD and ncmpcpp
======
![][1]
MPD, as the name implies, is a Music Playing Daemon. It can play music but, being a daemon, any piece of software can interface with it and play sounds, including some CLI clients.
One of them is called _ncmpcpp_, which is an improvement over the pre-existing _ncmpc_ tool. The name change doesn’t have much to do with the language they’re written in: they’re both C++, but _ncmpcpp_ is called that because it’s the _NCurses Music Playing Client__Plus Plus_.
### Installing MPD and ncmpcpp
The _ncmpmpcc_ client can be installed from the official Fedora repositories with DNF directly with
```
$ sudo dnf install ncmpcpp
```
On the other hand, MPD has to be installed from the RPMFusion _free_ repositories, which you can enable, [as per the official installation instructions][2], by running
The most painless way to set up MPD is to run it as a regular user. The default is to run it as the dedicated _mpd_ user, but that causes all sorts of issues with permissions.
Before we can run it, we need to create a local config file that will allow it to run as a regular user.
To do that, create a subdirectory called _mpd_ in _~/.config_:
```
$ mkdir ~/.config/mpd
```
copy the default config file into this directory:
```
$ cp /etc/mpd.conf ~/.config/mpd
```
and then edit it with a text editor like _vim_, _nano_ or _gedit_:
```
$ nano ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf
```
I recommend you read through all of it to check if there’s anything you need to do, but for most setups you can delete everything and just leave the following:
```
db_file "~/.config/mpd/mpd.db"
log_file "syslog"
```
At this point you should be able to just run
```
$ mpd
```
with no errors, which will start the MPD daemon in the background.
### Using ncmpcpp
Simply run
```
$ ncmpcpp
```
and you’ll see a ncurses-powered graphical user interface in your terminal.
Press _4_ and you should see your local music library, be able to change the selection using the arrow keys and press _Enter_ to play a song.
Doing this multiple times will create a _playlist_, which allows you to move to the next track using the _>_ button (not the right arrow, the _>_ closing angle bracket character) and go back to the previous track with _<_. The + and – buttons increase and decrease volume. The _Q_ button quits ncmpcpp but it doesn’t stop the music. You can play and pause with _P_.
You can see the current playlist by pressing the _1_ button (this is the default view). From this view you can press _i_ to look at the information (tags) about the current song. You can change the tags of the currently playing (or paused) song by pressing _6_.
Pressing the \ button will add (or remove) an informative panel at the top of the view. In the top left, you should see something that looks like this:
```
[------]
```
Pressing the _r_, _z_, _y_, _R_, _x_ buttons will respectively toggle the _repeat_, _random_, _single_, _consume_ and _crossfade_ playback modes and will replace one of the _–_ characters in that little indicator to the initial of the selected mode.
Pressing the _F1_ button will display some help text, which contains a list of keybindings, so there’s no need to write a complete list here. So now go on, be geeky, and play all your music from your terminal!
