Getting MPD Running

The daemon needs to run on the fileserver. This machine has speakers plugged in and running. Here's a brief list of the steps that we had to go through

• apt-get install mpd mpc
• change it to listen on ip `0.0.0.0` so that you can connect remotely
• change the path for the music to `/filestorage/music/music`
• restart mpd
• force updates with mpc update

This is to be installed and controlled on the control device. In my case the laptop

• install ncmpc
• add the following to the .bashrc

  alias ncmpc="ncmpc --host=lawton --port=6600"

Podcasts are located in a directory `/filestorage/music/music/Podcasts`

• download peapod and set it up with the feeds you want to get and have them saved to the podcasts directory
• once that runs we now have to update our playlist we created in mpd. The following script will read the Podcasts directory and update the m3u playlist with the podcasts in the directory

  #!/usr/bin/env python
   
  import os
   
  podcast_dir = '/filestorage/music/music/Podcasts/'
  playlist_file = '/var/lib/mpd/playlists/podcasts.m3u'
  playlist = []
   
  def find_mp3s(root, file_list):
      for name in file_list:
          if name[-3:] == 'mp3':
              part = root.lstrip('/').partition('/')
              playlist.append(os.path.join(part[2], name))
   
  def create_playlist(podcasts):
      # now output these files to a playlist file
      out = open(playlist_file, 'w')
      podcasts.sort()
      for path in podcasts:
          out.writelines("%s\n" % path)
   
  for root, dirs, files in os.walk(podcast_dir):
      # if files are .mp3 files then add them to the playlist
      find_mp3s(root, files)
   
      # now check the directories
      for dir in dirs:
          for root, dir, files in os.walk(os.path.join(root, dir)):
              find_mp3s(root, files)
   
  create_playlist(playlist)
   
  print 'Playlist created with %s mp3 files' % len(playlist)

• Now we need to force mpd to update the library with the new podcasts downloaded

  mpc update

• I combined these steps with the following cron job I run once a day

  python /home/rharding/peapod/peapod.py && /home/rharding/podlister.py && mpc update

There is still a couple of issues

• You still have to manually clear the current playlist and reload the podcast playlist to see the updates
• There is no method of marking which ones you've read and cleaning up old podcasts we don't want any more