The Media Player Daemon (MPD) is a great tool to use a diskstation, PC or other network device with a sound card as a streaming client. There are many clients available, i.e. for iOS, Windows, Linux and even for the Nokia N9. With an MPD client, you can control your music with any of your devices, even in parallel. The music files only have to be on the device where MPD runs.

Nokia N9

Speaking about the Nokia N9, there is a great client called MPD Remote. It works well to play the music installed on my server. How ever the current version seems not to be able to play webradio streams. Because of that, I had a look on how to be able to control my webradios from my N9 and found a quite easy way.

Controlling a webradio stream with the N9

First of all, you need mpc (media player client) on your N9. There are already precompiled binaries available. You will need both packages installed:

1. libmpdclient2
2. mpc

After you installed them on your N9, you already can use mpc in the terminal:

mpc -h MY_MPD_IP -p MY_MPD_PORT clear
mpc -h MY_MPD_IP -p MY_MPD_PORT add http://mp3.lifechannel.ch/LC128
mpc -h MY_MPD_IP -p MY_MPD_PORT play

This will clear the playlist, add the webradio stream and start playing.

Since I do not want to use the terminal all the time, I created small scripts and desktop icons for them.

The following script will do the same as the above commands in the terminal:

#!/bin/sh
mpc -h MY_MPD_IP -p MY_MPD_PORT clear
mpc -h MY_MPD_IP -p MY_MPD_PORT add http://mp3.lifechannel.ch/LC128
mpc -h MY_MPD_IP -p MY_MPD_PORT play

Save it somewhere, i.e. in MyDocs/mpc/erf.sh

Now, we need a desktop file:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Categories=Utility;
Type=Application
Name=ERF
GenericName=ERF
Icon=/home/user/MyDocs/mpc/erf.png
Exec=sh /home/user/MyDocs/mpc/erf.sh

This file has to placed in /home/user/.local/share/applications/ i.e. as erf.desktop.
I also added a png file as an icon.

I made several scripts/icons for some of my favourite radios. I now can start/stop them with one click onto the icon: