Support

If you require technical support of any kind with MPDMan, please read through the information here first. For help on troubleshooting MPD, please consult the Official MPD site which has excellent information. If you still need help, please use the "email support" link on the About dialog in MPDMan as that will automatically include details about your mobile device which may assist us in resolving your problem. If all else fails, please Email us.

MPD Server Configuration

All the songs in your MPD music database MUST be tagged with ID3v1/ID3v2 tags in order to be recognised by MPDMan. While you should be able to play songs without Album, Artist and Title tags from stored playlists, you will be unable to retrieve cover art or lyrics or search for them in the music database browser.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: MPDMan crashes as soon as playback of music is started on the server.

A: Although 97%+ of the mobile devices currently in use today claim to be OpenGL ES2 compliant, we have noticed that a small number of devices don't fully comply with the specification. As a workaround, try disabling the display of cover art in the Preferences dialog. Please send us a support email from the link on the About dialog as this will include details of your particular device / model so we can further investigate.

Q: How do I configure the server to allow <some feature>

A: Please refer to the MPD user manual for help with configuring the server.

Q: MPDMan does not seem to be able to modify certain server configuration settings.

A: Some of the configuration settings exposed are only available in newer versions of the server. For example, single and consume were only added in version 0.15 of the server - attempting to turn these options on in the Server Settings dialog while connected to an older server will fail silently. Also, check the permissions associated with your session on the server. The default MPD configuration does not require a password and allows all permissions (read,add,control,admin). If you need a password to connect to the server, you may not have the control and/or admin permission assigned to your login.

Q: Last.fm stops updating whenever I switch away from MPDMan - for example to answer a phone call.

A: This is by design. During testing, the overwhelming majority of our testers wanted MPDMan to completely stop using network and battery whenever it was not active.

Q: MPDMan seems to have stopped retrieving album cover art and lyrics.

A: Your external storage may be full. MPDMan saves all the downloaded cover art image and lyrics in a directory called MPDMan on the external storage of your mobile device. If the storage fills, then it is not possible to add further files to the cache. You should use a file manager to manually remove some of the files that are filling your external storage. A future version of MPDMan may have a configuration setting allowing you to specify a maximum size for the cache and automatic deletion of old files.

Q: MPDMan does not seem to recognise the artist / album name of my songs even though I have saved them in appropriate directories on the server.

A: MPDMan does not attempt to parse the file names of the songs on the server. You should add appropriate ID3v1/ID3v2 tags to the songs to get them recognised in MPDMan.

Dialogs explained

Edit servers

MPDMan maintains a list of all the MPD servers. Each server is identified with a logical name that is used in the user interface. In order to connect to the server, MPDMan needs to know the IP address or DNS name of the server as well as the port. The MPD default port is 6600. If the server is located behind a firewall or NAT router, you will need this information to configure your firewall to allow network communication with the server.

MPD servers can also be password protected. Each password is associated with a list of permissions. You should specify the password here if you need to use a password to connect to the server. The default MPD configuration does not use passwords and allows all permissions to clients.

MPD can also be configured to enable HTTP streaming to clients. If you wish to enable this feature you will need to specify the port to use for the stream. The MPD configuration default is 8000. If the server is located behind a firewall or NAT router, you will need this information to configure your firewall to allow network communication with the server.

Preferences

The items on this dialog are used to configure the behaviour of MPDMan during operation.

Server settings

This dialog is used to view and configure the MPD server that MPDMan is currently connected to.

There are 3 sections:

Server Options

This section contains options that control the behaviour of MPD during playback. Consult the MPD documentation for more information on their meaning. Note that some of the options are only available in more recent versions of the MPD server.

Server Outputs

This section allows you to enable and disable each of the output plugins that are configured for your server. The plugins listed will vary depending on the server configuration. If you wish to use the HTTP streaming features of MPDMan Pro, you will need to configure the HTTP stream in the server configuration and enable it here.

Please consult the Official MPD site for details on plugin settings.

Server Statistics

This section displays statistics. The uptime and playtime values are updated periodically while the dialog is open.

Last.fm login

MPDMan can automatically update the Now Playing selection in your Last.fm profile as well as scrobble each track as it is played to enable Last.fm to keep track of your music listening history.

To use this feature, you will need to have a Last.fm account and enter your username and password when MPDMan starts. After authenticating successfully with Last.fm, the details of each song that you listen to will be reflected in your Last.fm profile automatically.

If you do not want to use this feature, simply disable "Last.fm scrobbling" in the Preferences dialog.

Known Issues

Future Development

The following are known restrictions that are unlikely to be fixed:

No support for RTL text (Hebrew, Arabic)
No support for CJK text (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)

The following features will be implemented in future versions:

Ability to reorder songs in current playlist
Ability to reorder songs in saved playlists
Ability to move songs from one saved playlist to another
Ability to remove songs from saved playlists
Ability to rename saved playlists
Ability to add arbitrary songs from the music database to a saved playlist
Update and rescan music database
Kill database server
Manage the cache of cover art and lyrics. Specify a maximum size and implement automatic removal of LRU items. Add UI to display cache size and contents and manually delete unwanted items.