
BPD Plugin
**********

BPD is a music player using music from a beets library. It runs as a
daemon and implements the MPD protocol, so it's compatible with all
the great MPD clients out there. I'm using Theremin, gmpc, Sonata, and
Ario successfully.


Dependencies
============

Before you can use BPD, you'll need the media library called GStreamer
(along with its Python bindings) on your system.

* On Mac OS X, you can use Homebrew. Run "brew install gstreamer" and
  then "brew install pygobject3".

* On Linux, you need to install GStreamer 1.0 and the GObject bindings
  for python. Under Ubuntu, they are called *python-gi* and
  *gstreamer1.0*.

* On Windows, you may want to try GStreamer WinBuilds (caveat emptor:
  I haven't tried this).

You will also need the various GStreamer plugin packages to make
everything work. See the *Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin* documentation
for more information on installing GStreamer plugins.


Usage
=====

To use the "bpd" plugin, first enable it in your configuration (see
*Using Plugins*). Then, you can run BPD by invoking:

   $ beet bpd

Fire up your favorite MPD client to start playing music. The MPD site
has a long list of available clients. Here are my favorites:

* Linux: gmpc, Sonata

* Mac: Theremin

* Windows: I don't know. Get in touch if you have a recommendation.

* iPhone/iPod touch: MPoD

One nice thing about MPD's (and thus BPD's) client-server architecture
is that the client can just as easily on a different computer from the
server as it can be run locally. Control your music from your laptop
(or phone!) while it plays on your headless server box. Rad!


Configuration
=============

To configure the plugin, make a "bpd:" section in your configuration
file. The available options are:

* **host**: Default: Bind to all interfaces.

* **port**: Default: 6600

* **password**: Default: No password.

* **volume**: Initial volume, as a percentage. Default: 100

Here's an example:

   bpd:
       host: 127.0.0.1
       port: 6600
       password: seekrit
       volume: 100


Implementation Notes
====================

In the real MPD, the user can browse a music directory as it appears
on disk. In beets, we like to abstract away from the directory
structure. Therefore, BPD creates a "virtual" directory structure
(artist/album/track) to present to clients. This is static for now and
cannot be reconfigured like the real on-disk directory structure can.
(Note that an obvious solution to this is just string matching on
items' destination, but this requires examining the entire library
Python-side for every query.)

We don't currently support versioned playlists. Many clients, however,
use plchanges instead of playlistinfo to get the current playlist, so
plchanges contains a dummy implementation that just calls
playlistinfo.

The "stats" command always send zero for "playtime", which is supposed
to indicate the amount of time the server has spent playing music. BPD
doesn't currently keep track of this.

The "update" command regenerates the directory tree from the beets
database.


Unimplemented Commands
======================

These are the commands from the MPD protocol that have not yet been
implemented in BPD.

Saved playlists:

* playlistclear

* playlistdelete

* playlistmove

* playlistadd

* playlistsearch

* listplaylist

* listplaylistinfo

* playlistfind

* rm

* save

* load

* rename

Deprecated:

* playlist

* volume
