How great the MPD might be, I couldn’t find any client that acts like iTunes does. Theremin was the only Mac client I could find, but unfortunately it crashed on me too often. Minion is a Firefox add-on which worked very well, but it’s UI is ugly in my opinion.

That’s why I still wanted to use iTunes as the “client” for MPD.

What you will need

• A networked media tank, like PopCorn Hour of course.
• A Mac with iTunes.
• NiceCast, an application that broadcasts any audio on your Mac.
• Music Player Daemon installed on your NMT. This can be installed using the Community Software Installer.
• Dropbear SSH Server installed on your NMT.

The scripts to make it all work

I created two AppleScripts which I put in /Library/iTunes/Scripts. You can also put them in the equivalent folder in your homedir. I just prefer to put them in the system-wide library folder, because the script is then available to all users on the Mac.

The first script is called Start stream to NMT. It’s doing the following steps:

• It mutes the system volume of the iMac. I don’t want to hear iTunes playing through the internal speaker of course !
• It starts NiceCast, which is a very nice audio streamer from Rogue Amoebe. I have setup NiceCast to start streaming audio coming from iTunes when the application starts up.
• Finally it starts the mpd daemon on the Popcorn Hour, and tells it to play the stream coming from NiceCast.

Here’s the script:

set volume 0

tell application “Nicecast”
launch
end tell

delay 2

do shell script “ssh root@popcorn ‘export MPD_HOST=localhost; export MPD_PORT=6600; /share/Apps/mpd/daemon.sh start; mpc stop; mpc clear; mpc add http://192.168.123.1:8000/listen; mpc play’”

The second script, as you might have guessed, is called Stop stream to NMT. It’s doing these things:

• It tells mpd to stop playing the stream.
• Shuts down the daemon. I don’t want the daemon to be running all the time as it disrupts video playback.
• It shuts down NiceCast, as there’s no need to stream the audio anymore.
• Finally it unmutes the system sound of the iMac.

Here’s the code:

do shell script “ssh root@popcorn ‘mpc stop; /share/Apps/mpd/daemon.sh stop”’

tell application “Nicecast”
quit
end tell

set volume 2

If you have any questions or remarks about this, don’t hesitate to contact me !

I’m m00nd0g. This will be my blog where I post stuff I find interesting. Have a nice stay !