These csrf attacks are very problematic because it is difficult for a user to protect himself from it without completely degrading the web experience, such as disabling javascript (which is not necessarily a sufficient counter measure). It is mainly up to the developer of a site or web application to prevent these attacks by making sure it is impossible to store code on their site that launches such attacks and by making sure their site is not vurnerable to such attacks. But truth is that most developers are just clueless.

However, distrinet, a reseach group of the University of Leuven, has published a firefox addon called csfire that attempts to mitigate csrf attacks. You can find the paper on csfire here.

But there’s this one minor annoyance I always encounter while using vimperator: vimperator always focusses on the first input text box it comes across on a web site. Some people may like this behavior but I certainly don’t. I have google’s search engine set as my home page and the search box always steals the focus. Usually I just want to fire a vimporator command to navigate to another site and entering insert mode because of this focus stealing certainly hinders me. Now I have finally narrowed it down to the setting that controls this behavior: focuscontent. Expanding ~/.vimperatorrc with

set focuscontent

disables input text box focussing. It certainly is a huge improvement. Yet another annoyance solved. Hop to the next one.

Hower, AUR has its limitations. For one, its sole function is to host pkgbuilds. So when you want to install something from AUR, you still have to go through the compile & build process. Depending on the software, this can be very cumbersome and time consuming. Instead you more likely want to install a package that has already been build, much like the regular Arch Linux repositories such as [core], [extra] and [community]. This is where the Unofficial User Repositories come in play. A user can easily set up its own repository with the repo-add script that comes with the package manager pacman. Generally, the user still needs to be very cautious with installing unofficial packages because of the potential dangers it may pose such as malicious software. It is recommended to verify the source of these packages or inspect the packages before installing.

Personally, there a few programs I frequently update myself, i.e. more frequently than then the official repositories, because of new functionality or bug fixes. Therefore I decided to share my efforts and make them available in my own unnoficial user repository. The repository can be accessed at http://www.nepherte.be/repo. To use my repository, add the following lines in /etc/pacman.conf:

[nepherte]
Server = http://www.nepherte.be/repo

The packages are for 64bit systems only as I don’t have a 32bit version of Arch installed. All packages are built in a clean chroot environment to avoid library linking problems. If you are interested in the pkgbuilds, you can find them  on my svn repo. To access my svn repo, you will have to authenticate yourself with username guest and password guest.

The packages I currently maintain are:

• x264
• ffmpeg
• mplayer
• netembryo

The first three are rebuilt on a monthly base at the very least and whenever there is audio involved, pulseaudio is supported. More packages will be added in the future.

I was surprised to see there was no fitting packaged mercury compiler available in any of the Arch Linux repositories. Arch has many compilers available but apparantly not the mercury compiler. I admit that mercury is perhaps not the most popular language, considering it is a) declarative and b) not backed by a major company like Microsoft, but I was suprised nonetheless. It may be worth mentioning that compiling mercury takes a little while (depending on your computer a few hours) so make sure you have the time if you’re building it.

CSRFTester is a whole different application. It is used for testing Cross Site Request Forgeries in web applications. It sits in between your browser and the internet and logs your http requests. Based on those logs, it can generate sample code to exploit possible csrf vurnerabilities. As the name suggests, it’s just for testing purposes and logging. Don’t expect any out of the box exploits.

Here’s the output of my Nvidia Geforce 8400M GS:

display: :0.0   screen: 0
API version: 0
Information string: NVIDIA VDPAU Driver Shared Library  190.36  Wed Sep 23 06:55:52 PDT 2009
 
Video surface:
 
name   width height types
-------------------------------------------
420     4096  4096  NV12 YV12
422     4096  4096  UYVY YUYV 
 
Decoder capabilities:
 
name               level macbs width height
-------------------------------------------
MPEG1                 0  8192  2048  2048
MPEG2_SIMPLE          3  8192  2048  2048
MPEG2_MAIN            3  8192  2048  2048
H264_MAIN            41  8192  2048  2048
H264_HIGH            41  8192  2048  2048
VC1_SIMPLE            1  8190  2048  2048
VC1_MAIN              2  8190  2048  2048
VC1_ADVANCED          4  8190  2048  2048
 
Output surface:
 
name              width height nat types
----------------------------------------------------
B8G8R8A8          8192  8192    y  Y8U8V8A8 V8U8Y8A8
R10G10B10A2       8192  8192    y  Y8U8V8A8 V8U8Y8A8 
 
Bitmap surface:
 
name              width height
------------------------------
B8G8R8A8          8192  8192
R8G8B8A8          8192  8192
R10G10B10A2       8192  8192
B10G10R10A2       8192  8192
A8                8192  8192
 
Video mixer:
 
feature name                    sup
------------------------------------
DEINTERLACE_TEMPORAL             y
DEINTERLACE_TEMPORAL_SPATIAL     y
INVERSE_TELECINE                 y
NOISE_REDUCTION                  y
SHARPNESS                        y
LUMA_KEY                         y
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L1        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L2        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L3        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L4        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L5        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L6        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L7        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L8        -
HIGH QUALITY SCALING - L9        -
 
parameter name                  sup      min      max
-----------------------------------------------------
VIDEO_SURFACE_WIDTH              y         1     4096
VIDEO_SURFACE_HEIGHT             y         1     4096
CHROMA_TYPE                      y
LAYERS                           y         0        4
 
attribute name                  sup      min      max
-----------------------------------------------------
BACKGROUND_COLOR                 y
CSC_MATRIX                       y
NOISE_REDUCTION_LEVEL            y      0.00     1.00
SHARPNESS_LEVEL                  y     -1.00     1.00
LUMA_KEY_MIN_LUMA                y
LUMA_KEY_MAX_LUMA                y

In case you’re wondering, vdpau is an api that allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware, resulting in less cpu load.

Skype is strictly 32bit and my Arch Linux installation is 64bit. While this should only be a matter of installing the necessary 32bit libraries, I’m not very keen on doing so because I just don’t like mixing 32bit and 64bit on a single installation. Why would I otherwise want 64bit, right? This once, for testing purposes, I figured I could put my personal considerations aside.

Another conflict is pulseaudio, which, until this latest release, was not supported by Skype. I’m glad they did as pulseaudio will be used a lot more now that gnome uses it by default. Oddly enough, they dropped oss support. This doesn’t affect me but certainly a lot of other people.

Video (webcam) support is also a usual area of conflict. Handling webcams is not done in a unified way on linux and hence causes a lot of conflicts. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to do a thing other than installing the driver for my webcam.

So after installing the necessary 32bit libraries (including pulseaudio) and installing the driver for my webcam, Skype worked without any problem for the first time. Now it is simply a matter of crowding my skype contact list.

MPlayer has initial support for libnemesi to handle rtsp stream, as an alternative for live555 and that would be the only reason I wanted to try it out. MPlayer should automatically detect libnemesi. Otherwise you will have to append the –extra-cflags option to the ./configure statement.

While netembryo is getting more and more stable, libnemesi is still in early development and  no official release exists as of yet. In fact, many libnemesi revisions don’t even want to compile so it can be a real drag to find one that does. I’ll save you some time: the public git version of 20090501 works.

Original February 14, 2009: Poor Man’s Tiling Window Manager is uh_no_hu’s attempt to add basic tiling window functionality to the desktop, independent of the used desktop environment or window manager. It is known to work with pekwm,  openbox and metacity. It’s a small python script that should be assigned to key combinations and currently provides 4 features:

• tiling – the basic tiling layout: one window in the main column (left) with all the other windows at the side (right)
• left – put the active window to the left
• right – put the active window the the right
• swap – swich the active window with the window in the main column

The wanted option is to be provided as an argument of the python script. The script relies on wmctrl and xdotool so make sure you have these two packages. Otherwise the script will not work.

The left/right option is somewhat similar to a function of the new Windows 7 that sticks a window the side. Tiling and swap are the classic features that come with a true tiling window manager.

Though it is not a full replacement for true tiling window managers, it can be considered as an add-on for regular window managers. Whereas someone will use a true tiling window manager (dwm, xmonad, awesome, wmii, ..) to get full tiling support, someone less technical should really try out this easy to use script because most, if not all true tiling window managers tend to be difficult to configure/use.

To give you an idea of how the tiling layout looks like, here’s a nice picture:

To acquire a good MPlayer setup, you really don’t want to install the version packaged by your favorite distribution. The mainstream linux distributions like Ubuntu use “the latest” but very dated release of MPlayer. Their latest release,  v1.0rc2, dates from 7 October 2007. Go figure!  That doesn’t mean MPlayer isn’t actively being developed though. You see, the MPlayer developers believe in making continuous changes to their latest development version, generally referred to as the SVN version, rather than releasion official versions. This SVN version is 99% of the time stable, no need to worry there. Unfortunately, you will have to build it yourself. I will try to guide you through this rather lengthy process.

The build process consists of 3 main steps:

• Install x264
• Install useful multimedia libraries and FFMPEG
• Install MPlayer

Part I: x264
x264 is necessary for encoding videos in the  MPEG 4 AVC (H264/x264) codec. At the moment of writing this codec is one of the best and most popular codecs used (e.g. Blu-Ray) and undispensible if you intend to do some encoding. Before we continue, make sure you have the necessary build tools like make. They are usually bundled by your distribution in a general “build” package. Ubuntu, for example, has put everything in build-essential. Consult your distribution’s documentation to figure out what packages you need to build software.

x264 depends on the following packages:

• libx11
• gpac (optional).

The packages git, yasm and gettext are necessary for building x264. Technically you can remove the build dependencies after the x264 installation is completed but you will need them so often you might as well leave them installed. The installation of x264 goes as follows:

Get the sources:

git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git

Configure x264:

cd x264/
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-visualize --enable-shared --enable-pic --enable-mp4-output

You don’t need to worry much about these configuration options but I’ll briefly explain them. prefix= determines where the final build of x264 will reside. /usr is generally a good option. If prefix is not specified it will default to /usr/local/. enable-shared allows other programs to access this x264 build. This is something we really need. enable-mp4-output makes sure that we can save media files with the x264 codec to mp4 files. mp4-output requires you installed gpac. If you didn’t, remove this option from the ./configure line. enable-visualize speaks for itself. enable-pic builds position-independent code. You can get more info on the available configuration options with ./configure –help (that’s two ‘-’ in case you are wondering).

Build and install x264:

make && sudo make install

You can verify that x264 is correctly installed by typing  x264 –version (again, two ‘-’). You might have encountered a build error during the installation process. Therefore I advise you to always carefully read the output generated by ./configure and make. Errors are usually printed at the end of the output. There is no point in continuing with another step/command if you have an error. Errors often occur because you overlooked a required dependency.

Part II: Install useful multimedia libraries and FFMPEG
To get a working MPlayer setup you technically don’t have to perform this step because the svn server of MPlayer already holds the necessary ffmpeg and other libraries. The main disadvantage of using a built-in ffmpeg is that MPlayer and MPlayer only can make use of it. This means that if another program requires ffmpeg, you will have to install it again which leads to a lot of duplicate ffmpegs. An advantage of having a built-in ffmpeg over a separate one is that the mplayer devs often add some optimizations to their ffmpeg branch that are not availabe in the official branch. The mplayer devs recommend using their branch (stating the obvious I suppose), I’ll explain both methods. If you prefer a built-in ffmpeg, skip this section. Still here? Libraries that I recommend to install for a separate ffmpeg, are:

• subversion, imlib2- build requirements for ffmpeg
• xvidcore – Support for xvid codec
• faad2 and faac - for AAC decoding and encoding
• smbclient – for network files playback
• lame – for mp3 encoding
• libtheora, libvorbis, speex – support for the open source theora, vorbis and speech codec
• zlib – support for compression

Some less commonly used optional features for ffmpeg:

• sdl – if you want ffmpeg to be able to play video files
• gsm – another lossy speech compression codec
• dirac or libschroedinger – video compression codec
• amrnb, amrwb – adaptive amr narrow and wide band speech codec

Try to install them with the package management installer that comes with your distribution but I suggest you check the repository version of a library with the latest version.

Now let’s continue with FFMPEG. FFMPEG and MPlayer are practically twins, they go hand in hand with eachother. FFMPEG provides MPlayer with the most important tools to play multimedia: the common and not so common codecs for playback and encoding, (de)muxers for opening containers like mp4 and avi, filters and post processors.

Get the source:

svn co svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

Compile it:

cd ffmpeg/
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libfaac --enable-xvid --enable-x264 --enable-libtheora --enable-libspeex --enable-postproc --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-shared --enable-network --enable-pthreads --enable-x11grab --arch=`uname -m`

If you didn’t install all the packages from above, simply remove the corresponding configure option. If you  installed something out of the list of less commonly used libraries, add the corresponding option to the ./configure line. Remember to check ./configure –help for more information on the configuration options. After the ./configure [...] command, a nice layout with all the supported codecs and much more will be printed.

Build and install it:

make && sudo make install

Et voilà. You should have a working ffmpeg. FFMPEG includes a player (if you installed sdl, that is) so you can verify that you installed it successfully by playing a media file. This is how you do it: ffplay <path to video file>. I will remind you here again that you may have encountered a build error during the installation process. Therefore I advise you to always carefully read the output generated by ./configure and make. Errors are usually printed at the end of the output. There is no point in continuing with another step/command if you have an error. Errors often occur because you overlooked a required dependency.

Part III: Install MPlayer
Now we can finally move on to installing MPlayer. Some additional packages you could install:

• freetype, fribidi, aalib – for unicode and ascii support (subtitles)
• live555 – support for streaming
• libmpcdec – for musepack
• twolame or toolame – for optimized mpeg layer 2 encoding (twolame excludes toolame and vice versa)
• openal, opengl, libxmvc, libxv, directfb, libpng, libjpeg – for more video and audio outputs .

They’re all optional dependencies but they increase the capabilities of MPlayer a lot so there’s no reason not the install them.

Get the sources:

svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

Patch MPlayer so it can disable the gnome-screensaver as well. There are patches for KDE as well, but I use GNOME:

wget http://www.nepherte.be/files/mplayer-svn-gnome-screensaver.patch
cd mplayer
patch -p1 ../mplayer-svn-gnome-screensaver.patch

The configure script of MPlayer incorporates a sort of auto-detection. It will check for a certain library/feature where it is normally located and afterwards it will set everything correct to use that feature. It is therefore recommended not to force or –enable an option in the ./configure line as it breaks the path detection of that feature.

Configure MPlayer with built-in (static) ffmpeg:

./configure --prefix=/usr --confdir=/etc/mplayer --disable-gui --enable-menu --enable-runtime-cpudetection --enable-largefiles

Configure MPlayer without built-in (shared) ffmpeg:

./configure --prefix=/usr --confdir=/etc/mplayer --disable-gui --enable-menu --enable-runtime-cpudetection --enable-largefiles --disable-libavutil_a --disable-libavcodec_a --disable-libavformat_a --disable-libpostproc_a --disable-libswscale_a

I explicitely disabled the built-in gui because there are a lot better guis available. I’ll deal with this in Comprehensive MPlayer Guide III. The configure options that end with _a disable the built-in ffmpeg. The rest is pretty self-explanatory. You can save some space and compilation time by disabling unneeded features. Things I usually disable, are:

--disable-inet6  --disable-tv  --disable-radio  --disable-ossaudio --disable-jack --disable-esd --disable-lirc --disable-dvb

More information on the configure options can be found by executing ./configure –help.

Now build and install MPlayer:

make && sudo make install

Again check the outputs of each command for errors. You can verify that mplayer is installed correctly with the command mplayer <path to video file>. As mentioned before, I’ll deal with the good guis for MPlayer in the next article.

If you come across an error during one of the installs and you can’t figure out how to fix them, drop a note and I’ll try to help out wherever possible.

The follow up, Comprehensive Guide III: Video Playback & Desktop Integration, will soon be available.

The guide includes 4 major sections:

• Introduction
• Installation
• Video Playback & Desktop Integration
• Video Encoding

of which this is the first section: the introduction.

There are a lot of video players at hand. I’m going to use MPlayer, but why’s that?. MPlayer is by far the best multimedia player for linux. Not only does it handle video and audio content perfectly, it’s also capable of playing streams and integrates nicely in your browser.  It even supports video hardware acceleration for those with a recent video card. Yes, there are some alternatives like VLC, but none are as flexible as MPlayer.  You can easily determine which codecs should be enabled and which not. You’re not stuck with one gui. There are multiple guis available for several platforms. No matter what environment you are using, there’s a solution for every one of them.

Another thing that stands out is MEncoder. MEncoder is a part of MPlayer and is a tool to easily encode audio, video and extract subtitles. Everything you ever needed for encoding media is included in this application. Combining MPlayer and MEncoder make the perfect multimedia application.

The follow-up, Comprehensive MPlayer Guide II: Installation is now available.

You can use this plug-in in a few ways. You can launch Cooliris from your browser and search for media, or, you could browse on one of the many supported sites, hover over the image and click on the icon that appears. You can browse your local media files as well.

The “problem” however can be easily solved. It’s as easy as

• figuring out the commands to play, pause and switch songs in mpd
• assigning this command to a key

For both steps exist several solutions of which I will explain one.

Figuring out the commands
You can’t control the playback of songs directly with mpd. You will have to do it with the frontend you are using. In my case that’s ncmpcpp but any other frontend such as mpc or ncmpc will do. Each action can be supplied as an argument for the ncmpcpp command:

• playback/pause: ncmpcpp toggle
• previous song: ncmpcpp prev
• next song: ncmpcppp next
• stop: ncmpcpp stop

Assigning keys to the commands
I believe all desktop environments/window managers provide a way to assign keys to predefined and custom actions. The predefined actions in Gnome are easily accessible through the Gnome control center (Alt + F2 gnome-control-center). As mentioned earlier, the predefined actions for music playback don’t’ work with mpd. We will have to create custom actions.

The custom actions in Gnome are well hidden in gconf-editor. Press Alt + F2 and type gconf-editor to open it. Navigate to /app/metacity/keybinding_commands and fill in the commands we found earlier. Afterwards you can assign a key to each command in /app/metacity/global_keybindings. Key modifiers like Ctrl and Alt are <Control> and <Alt> respectively.  I, for example, added ncmpcpp next to command_1 and assigned <Control>Left (Left is the left arow key) to run_command_1.

Not only the GUI makes it easier for you, the standard presets do as well. You don’t know what the good settings are for video playback on your iphone? No worries, simply use the iphone preset. There are presets available for other apple devices, gaming consoles, high/normal quality movies and animation videos. If one of the existing presets isn’t what you are looking for, you can create one for yourself so you don’t have to enter the same settings over and over again.

The most common codecs for both video and audio are included in HandBrake. All the popular containers are there too.

• Video codecs : H.264 (x264/MPEG-4 AVC), MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid and ffmpeg) and Theora.
• Audio codecs: AAC (faac), MP3 (lame), Vorbis and AC3 passthrough.
• Containers: mkv, avi, ogg, mp4 and m4v.

H.264 combined with AAC will give you the best quality and you can even tweak the settings  of H.264 in a separate tab. For those that don’t know what settings they should use, I can recommend a slightly adapted version of the High Preset for films:

Not all H.264 options are included in the gui as this would overload the gui too much. The developpers do give you the possibility to add extra options manually though, a great feature indeed. For dxva compatible playback (your graphics card doing the decoding work), you can paste these settings in the manual options box:

ref=5:mixed-refs:bframes=3:weightb:direct=auto:b-pyramid:me=umh:8x8dct:partitions=all:vbv-bufsize=50000:vbv-maxrate=50000:trellis=2

Remember that encoding takes up a lot of time depending on the processor your computer is equiped with and the chosen settings.

I already explained setting up and running mpd. Only a few changes are worth mentioning. First of all you will have to change the bind address. By default it’s set to 127.0.0.1 so only the local host can connect to it. Since we will be connecting to mpd remotely with the iphone we have to change this value (the iphone will recognize 127.0.0.1 as itself). Open up ~/.mpdconf and make this change:

bind_to_address = any

I also suggest you enable password authentication in mpd as anyone with access to your network will be able to connect:

password "yourpasswordhere@read,add,control,admin"

Remember that if you have a firewall blocking incoming connections (iptables doesn’t do this by default), you will have to allow tcp connections on port 6600. That’s it for the server side.

For the iphone, it’s even easier. There are a few mpd clients that exist for the iphone: impdclient and mpod. I tried the latter. It’s available in the app store (firmware 2.x required). Simply install it and an icon will appear in the home screen. Launch mpod and fill in the settings in its configuration menu. Pay extra attention to the ip address. When the server running mpd is using dhcp, the ip address might change. Therefore I recommend you use static ip addresses.

That’s pretty much it. You can now control your music remotely from your iphone. An ideal music center setup.

Mpd and ncmpc++ are perfect examples of these console programs. Mpd, also known as Music Player Daemon, is a powerful server side console application for playing music and ncmpc++ is one of the many console front-ends available for mpd (note that gui front-ends also exist). Mpd is cross-platform (although windows support is in a very experimental phase) and can also be controlled from an external device like a mobile phone. This makes it an ideal combination for a media server: your phone or other device as a remote control for your sound system running mpd. If you paid attention to what I said, you’ll conclude that mpd does not stream audio. I repeat: mpd does not stream audio. All playback occurs on the server. However, you output to a stream server like Icecast. Besides that, it also makes a great desktop music player program where both mpd and ncmpc++ are installed on the same computer. Inspired by K.Mandla‘s  “how to become a pro at ..” I will show you how to do so and become a “pro” at using mpd and ncmpc++.

Setting Up mpd
First, you will need to install mpd. Every self respecting linux distribution has it in their software repositories, hence the installation of the package shouldn’t be a problem. For Ubuntu it would be “sudo apt-get install mpd”, for Arch Linux “sudo pacman -S mpd” and so on. For more information on installing mpd, you can always check out their extensive wiki: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Install. The few configuration changes that have to be made, are done in /etc/mpd.conf for system-wide use, or in ~/.mpdconf for individual users. I will only explain setting it up for each individual user as it has several advantages over a system wide install such as setting up a separate music library, own playlists and resume of songs for each user individually.

1. Copy the system wide configuration file /etc/mpd.conf to ~/.mpdconf (~ denotes the users home directory):

cp /etc/mpd.conf ~/.mpdconf

2. Before we edit the config file, we will create some files and directories we will be using later on:

mkdir -p ~/.mpd/playlists
touch ~/.mpd/mpd.db
touch ~/.mpd/mpd.error
touch ~/.mpd/log

3. Now edit ~/.mpdconf to reflect these settings:

music_directory                 "/full/path/to/your/music/directory"
playlist_directory              "~/.mpd/playlists"
db_file                         "~/.mpd/mpd.db"
log_file                        "~/.mpd/mpd.log"
error_file                      "~/.mpd/mpd.error"
pid_file                        "~/.mpd/mpd.pid"
state_file                      "~/.mpd/mpdstate"
bind_to_address                 "127.0.0.1"
port                            "6600"

As you will see, there are two entries for each setting: one system wide and one user based. You have to comment out the system wide ones with # and enable the user based by uncommenting them and filling in the correct values (like mine above). The names of the settings speak for themselves and additional documentation is often added in the configuration file itself. Be sure to replace /full/path/to/your/music/directory with the correct path to your music directory and yourusername with your actual username. You can change the port if you want to, but there’s generally no point in doing that. You can also restrict access to mpd (remember, you can control it from a remote device) by uncommenting the password entry and supplying a password. Typically, you don’t have to mess with the audio output settings, but if you have problems later on remember these settings: Uncommenting the alsa output is then your best bet (since it ships with basically every linux distribution by default as it is included in the kernel).

There also exists a configuration page on their wiki.

Using mpd
Now that you have mpd installed and configured, you can start using it. There really isn’t much to say about using mpd. All you have to do is running the command mpd as user and creating the music library database file. It will look into your music_directory, create an entry for each music file and put information about it in mpd.db:

mpd --create-db
mpd

The cool thing about having a command line music player daemon is that you don’t need a X server running to play music. Are you tired of your music stopping when you log on and off your system? No problem, mpd will keep running when you log on and off. When you start mpd it will also resume the last song that was playing if you abruptly stopped the mpd daemon.

If mpd gives you any trouble like not starting up, no sound or not creating a mpd.db file, check out mpd.log and mpd.error. It will give you a headstart in figuring out what’s wrong.

Setting up ncmpc++
Now we still need something to control mpd with. Ncmpcpp is almost an exact clone of ncmpc but it contains some new features ncmpc doesn’t have. It’s been also rewritten from scratch in C++ and more importantly, it’s actively being developped. As I told before, there exist other clients both command line and graphical as web based. Hell, you can even get a client that runs on your Iphone or Ipod Touch. But I can assure you, ncmpc++ pretty much does it all: playlists, crossfading, tag editing, fetching lyrics… You name it, it’s got it.

As far as I know only Arch Linux, Gentoo and FreeBSD have ncmpcpp in their software repositories. So you might have to get your hands dirty with compiling it yourself. But hey, if you already get so far reading this, it really shouldn’t be a problem. People seriously considering a console music player, probably have the skill to compile it as well. Detailed installation instructions can be found on the ncmpcpp site.

I’m not really going into the configuration of ncmpc++. The default configuration will certainly do. Only when you intend to use the tag editor, you will have to set the proper path to the mpd music directory in ~/.ncmpcpp/config (the path you also filled in the config file of mpd). The rest is a bunch of color and format settings. You can also configure the shortcut keys in ~/.ncmpcpp/keys. More on the shortcut keys later.

Using ncmpc++
You can launch ncmpc++ in the terminal with:

ncmpcpp

When you launch it, you are welcomed by the playlist window that shows the songs of the playlist you are currently listening to

At the top, you see what menus are available and their corresponding key to access it (by default numbers from 1 to 7 and fn keys):
1:Help
2:Playlist
3:Browse
4:Search
5:Library
6:Playlist editor
7:Tag editor

The meaning of these menus are pretty obvious. A quick way to switch from the playlist to the browse menu and back is the tab key. The global keys to use in each menu are the arrow up and down to navigate and enter to select. To go to the parent directory you can use backspace. To start a selected song, press enter, s to stop a song and P to pause. > and < are used to go forward and backward one track. r is used to enable/disable repeat mode and z for random selection of the songs in the playlist. Deleting a song in your playlist can be done with d and clearing the whole playlist with c. You can increase and decrease the volume with + and -. If you want to quit ncmpc++, press q. As you can see, the shortcut keys somehow make sense, they mostly are the first character of the action you want to perform. Very easy to remember although it can be a bit overwhelming the first time.

When you stored a new music file in your music directory, you will have to update mpd’s database. I told you before that you can use this command:

mpd --create-db

but ncmpc++ also has this functionality, accessible with u. So absolutely no need to quit ncmpcpp.

The previous short cuts were just the basic commands to get you started. This was only the beginning. You can for example cross-fade from one song to another with x. Fetching lyrics is l, looking up detailed information on the performing artist is I. The latter two perform a search on the internet. It’s possible it doesn’t find a match on the net, but that’s only the case with less known, most time local artist and songs. I tried it with some local artists from my country and it only missed one out of many. Another information key i gives you information about the music file itself such as file name and tags. You can go out of the lyrics, artist and file information screens by pressing the same button.

I’ll quickly look into searching your music database. If you have a playlist with a lot of songs or you have hundreds of artists, it’s very annoying to use the slow navigate arrow up and down key. You can instead do a quick forward and backward search with / and ?. If you want to perform a more complex search, you can always use the search menu (4 or F4) but I find that takes a lot of time and I don’t think a lot of people use it.

Integrated with ncmpc++ is an advanced tag editor. It’s one of the few command line players for mpd that have this. With this you can edit whatever tag you want of a music file in your database. The usage speaks for itself. As I told before, to get this functionality to work, you will have to supply the path the music directory in ~/.ncmpcpp/config.

All of the shortcut keys are configurable in ~/.ncmpcpp/keys. If you are unhappy with a certain key, you can change each one of them in that file.

This is as far as I’m willing to go with covering ncmpcpp’s functionality. I believe I’ve summed up the most important things. Feel free to notify me of other things I have overlooked. All the functionality and how to access them should be listed in the help menu (1 or F1).