Last Updated on August 11, 2021
Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. We’ve reviewed the vast majority, and are 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.
We’ve reviewed a fair few MPD clients over the past couple of years or so including Cantata, Ymuse, mpdevil, ympd, myMPD, ampd, ncmpy, ncmpc, and ncmpcpp. Our favorite 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, ncmpc and ncmpcpp are terminal-based clients. So there’s something for everyone.
mmtc is billed as a minimal MPD terminal client that aims to be simple yet highly configurable. The software is written in Rust and published under an open source license.
Installation
With any MPD client, the first stage is to install and configure MPD. Our review of ympd covered the basics so we won’t repeat the process here.
Once MPD is working, we can install mmtc on Ubuntu with the commands.
$ sudo apt install cargo
$ cargo install mmtc
Then it’s recommended you add ~/.cargo/.bin to your PATH so that you can run mmtc from any directory.
And you’ll need some way of adding music to your queue, as mmtc offers no library management functionality. One possibility is to install mpc:
$ sudo apt install mpc
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary