ncmpcpp

ncmpcpp – featureful ncurses based MPD client inspired by ncmpc

Last Updated on August 11, 2021

Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.

MPD is a powerful server-side application for playing music. In a home environment, you can connect an MPD server to a Hi-Fi system, and control the server using a notebook or smartphone. You can, of course, play audio files on remote clients. MPD can be started system-wide or on a per-user basis.

I’ve covered a fair few MPD clients over the past year or so including Cantata, Ymuse, mpdevil, ympd, myMPD, ampd, ncmpy, and ncmpc. My favorite of them is Cantata although Ymuse is a simple alternative. There’s lots of differences between these front-ends. For example, Cantata uses the Qt widget set, whereas Ymuse and mpdevil offer a GTK front-end. ympd, myMPD and ampd are web-based clients. And ncmpy and ncmpc are terminal-based clients. So there’s something for everyone.

ncmpcpp is a terminal-based MPD client with a user interface that seeks inspiration from ncmpc and shares a lot of similarities. But it adds some useful features. Let’s check it out. Before doing so, here’s the obligatory installation section.

Installation

With any MPD client, the first stage is to install and configure MPD. Our review of ympd covered the basics so I won’t repeat the process here.

Once MPD is working, we can compile and install ncmpcpp. Our system was missing one of the dependencies, specifically the boost library. There are some other optional dependencies but they were already installed on our systems.

$ sudo apt install libboost1.71-all-dev

Next clone the project’s GitHub repository, and compile the software.

$ git clone https://github.com/ncmpcpp/ncmpcpp.git
$ cd ncmpcpp
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make -j4
$ sudo make install

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary

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