Alternative MPD clients to GMPC
GMPC (GNOME Music Player Client) is a audio player based on MPD (Music Player Daemon) that I've been using as my main audio player for years now.
Unfortunately, it's marked as "unmaintained" in the official list of MPD clients, along with basically every client available in Debian. In fact, if you look closely, all but one of the 5 unmaintained clients are in Debian (ario, cantata, gmpc, and sonata), which is kind of sad. And none of the active ones are packaged.
GMPC status and features
GMPC, in particular, is basically dead. The upstream website domain has been lost and there has been no release in ages. It's built with GTK2 so it's bound to be destroyed in a fire at some point anyways.
Still: it's really an awesome client. It has:
- cover support
- lyrics and tabs lookups (although those typically fail now)
- last.fm lookups
- high performance: loading thousands of artists or tracks is almost instant
- repeat/single/consume/shuffle settings (single is particularly nice)
- (global) keyboard shortcuts
- file, artist, genre, tag browser
- playlist editor
- plugins
- multi-profile support
- avahi support
- shoutcast support
Regarding performance, the only thing that I could find to slow down gmpc is to make it load all of my 40k+ artists in a playlist. That's slow, but it's probably understandable.
It's basically impossible to find a client that satisfies all of those.
But here are the clients that I found, alphabetically. I restrict myself to Linux-based clients.
CoverGrid
CoverGrid looks real nice, but is sharply focused on browsing covers. It's explicitly "not to be a replacement for your favorite MPD client but an addition to get a better album-experience", so probably not good enough for a daily driver. I asked for a FlatHub package so it could be tested.
mpdevil
mpdevil is a nice little client. It supports:
- repeat, shuffle, single, consume mode
- playlist support (although it fails to load any of my playlist with
a
UnicodeDecodeError) - nice genre / artist / album cover based browser
- fails to load "all artists" (or takes too long to (pre-?)load covers?)
- keyboard shortcuts
- no file browser
Overall pretty good, but performance issues with large collections, and needs a cleanly tagged collection (which is not my case).
QUIMUP
QUIMUP looks like a simple client, C++, Qt, and mouse-based. No Flatpak, not tested.
SkyMPC
SkyMPC is similar. Ruby, Qt, documentation in Japanese. No Flatpak, not tested.
Xfmpc
Xfmpc is the XFCE client. Minimalist, doesn't seem to have all the features I need. No Flatpak, not tested.
Ymuse
Ymuse is another promising client. It has trouble loading all my artists or albums (and that's without album covers), but it eventually does. It does have a Files browser which saves it... It's noticeably slower than gmpc but does the job.
Cover support is spotty: it sometimes shows up in notifications but not the player, which is odd. I'm missing a "this track information" thing. It seems to support playlists okay.
I'm missing an album cover browser as well. Overall seems like the most promising.
Written in Golang. It crashed on a library update. There is an ITP in Debian, update: it just (2022-10-17) entered Debian, see the package tracker for the current status.
Conclusion
For now, I guess that ymuse is the most promising client, even though it's still lacking some features and performance is suffering compared to gmpc. I'll keep updating this page as I find more information about the projects. I do not intend to package anything yet, and will wait a while to see if a clear winner emerges.
Thank you for your post. I'm using MPD and testing MPD-clients since a long time. Until recently, I considered ncmpcpp as the best MPD-client. By the way, it is missing in your list. But Ymuse 0.21 catches the crown from ncmpcpp, because it became faster and more feature rich.