Music player daemon

Updating the Music Player Daemon (MPD)

on a Raspberry Pi running Raspberry Pi OS Operating System

20th October 2022

 

The Raspberry Pi is iusually installed with the Raspberry Pi OS (Formerly Raspbian) operating system. At the time of writing the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS is called Bullseye which uses version 5.10.92 of the Linux kernel or later. Bullseye is currently released with Music Player Daemon (MPD) version 0.22.6 which is fairly out of date. Unfortunately, Raspberry Pi OS Buster is even worse and is released with a years out-of-date version of MPD.  MPD is used by the Internet Radio project described in other pages on this site.

There are three methods to update the Music Player daemon

1. Download and install the  ready made mpd_0.23.9_armhf.deb (for Bullseye)  upgrade package from this site.

2. Download and install the  ready made mpd_0.23.5_armhf.deb (for Buster)  upgrade package from this site.

3. Download the latest source from the MPD foundation and compile and install it on the Raspberry Pi.

 

This procedure also explains how to install the latest version (0.34) of the Music Player Daemon client (MPC)

 

The version described in this procedure is for MPD version 0.23.9 for Bullseye or 0.23.5 for Buster. The version released standard with Buster is only version 0.21.5 which is some forty versions behind the latest one. The latest version of MPD is also much more reliable than the older version. Due to its age it is almost impossible to get support on the older versions of MPD released with Raspberry OS if there is a problem.

The manual below describes how to either download and install the ready made package or compile and install MPD from source. Although this documentation is based upon MPD version 0.23.8 it can probably be used for later versions of MPD simply by amending the version number in the instruction. This procedure is based upon the documentation found in the User Manual at  musicpd.org. The Internet Radio Manual also contains the instructions for installing the MPD upgrade package.

---

Disclaimer

The Bob Rathbone Computer Consultancy (BRCC) does not provide any direct support for Music Player Daemon software. If there are problems with MPD itself then you are referred to the Music Player Daemon Forum for support. BRCC simply compiles the MPD source directly downloaded from musicpd.org without modification. There are also no guarantees that this procedure will work for later releases of MPD than version 0.23.x as BRCC has no control over the development process employed by musicpd.org, neither shall BRCC be under any obligation to correct or maintain this procedure. However, it is vey likely that it will work for later releases of MPD with minimum modification. The procedure described in the manual below is provided as is, without guarantee, warranties expressed or implied and BRCC shall not be liable for any loss or damage how so ever caused. You use this procedure at your own risk. See the full DISCLAIMER in the manual below.