Checking Out Sonata and MPD

I’ve heard about MPD as a music player. It is a music player I’ve never really felt like checking out in the past because I was afraid that the config file might be overwhelming. Anyhow, I recently saw a guide to using Sonata and MPD as a music player.

playing a song using mpd + sonata

So why the heck do I need two things to play music?

Let me say this: MPD is basically a daemon that runs in the background to make sure that you could play music. Sonata is the graphical way for you to control it. I’ve read so many raves about how powerful it is as a command line player but at least Sonata as its graphical front-end makes me appreciate the information about the songs. Sonata’s song information section will fetch information such as

• title
• artist
• album
• date
• track
• genre
• lyrics
• album info

There are other things that people rave about in Sonata. One of them’s keyboard driven shortcuts. There’s also support for Audioscrobbler.

Anyhow, the instructions that the webupd8 blog gave are pretty much everything I needed to set it up and running. However, I hit a snag when I tried to run Sonata at first. Because it didn’t see the library of files. Annoying, right? So I tried running MPD first in a terminal. It gave me an error regarding not being able to set the user id. I ran mpd as root. Guess what happened next? It’s working perfectly fine now. Ain’t it grand?

So yeah, you could try out MPD and Sonata by following their instructions. But here are two tips I could give you for now:

• Copy the mpd config file from /etc/mpd.conf to /home/your_username/.mpdconf so that mpd will look there instead of /etc. Also, it would lessen the hassle of editing mpd’s config file.
• Run mpd as root first before starting Sonata. Because it’s really much easier that way.

So far, it looks good. There’s a smaller percentage of memory being consumed by a media playing application. Memory here’s at 1.2% so far. Neat huh?