Music Player Daemon (MPD) for Debian ------------------------------------ After installation, you will need to populate the MPD database. Update mpd.conf to point to your music directory, or move/symlink your music into the directory configured for mpd. Then, request a database update, preferably through a client such as running "mpc update", or by restarting the mpd daemon. The recommended way to run a "personal" mpd, as your own user while logged into a graphical user session from which a pulseaudio daemon has been started (as is the default in Debian nowadays), is to disable the default system service using the command (as root) "update-rc.d mpd disable", or "systemctl disable mpd" if you're using systemd. mpd is then started through the XDG autostart mechanism upon logging into your desktop environment, provided it can find a valid config file (such as ~/.mpdconf). Starting from the provided mpdconf.example, you'll likely want to uncomment and adjust all options in the "Files and directories" section, set bind_to_address (see below) as well as enable the non-optional pulse configuration. If on the other hand you want to set up additional instances of mpd as a system service, create a copy of your /etc/mpd.conf for each instance. Make sure that each instance has a different pid_file, state_file and bind_to_address/port. You probably want to specify a different audio_output for each, too. For sysvinit you need a copy of /etc/init.d/mpd for each instance, properly adjusting the value of MPDCONF at the top. Activate each copy by running "update-rc.d defaults" on it. For systemd make copies of /lib/systemd/system/mpd.{service,socket} in /etc/systemd/system/ as desired. Adjust the Description and ListenStream directives, and add the path to the respective copy of mpd.conf to ExecStart. Activate and start each instance using the 'systemctl enable' and 'systemctl start' commands. Watch package updates for changes to the default init script / systemd units, as your copies will not be upgraded. In the default /etc/mpd.conf, bind_to_address is set to "localhost" in order to prevent other (possibly untrusted) hosts from accessing MPD. If you wish to allow other hosts to access MPD, you must change this value to an appropriate interface, or comment it out to enable listening on all network interfaces. When using ALSA with dmix, you may run into problems sharing the sound card between the "mpd" user and your own account. A workaround is to use ALSA's "ipc_key_add_uid" and "ipc_perm" directives. See the ALSA documentation for instructions on how to add this to your configuration. Similarly, if you plan to use a JACK output, you might need to make mpd and jackd run under the same user, since a typical JACK setup doesn't permit several users to access the sound daemon.