[emms-help] Problems getting emms-player-mpd working, and solutions

[Alexis]

Hi all,

Context: 64-bit Debian Wheezy; MPD version 0.16.7-2+b1 (from repo);
Emacs 24.3.92.1 (manually compiled); EMMS 4.0 (MELPA 20140630.1158).

i recently spent a bit of time trying to get EMMS to work with my MPD
setup, using emms-player-mpd. After some frustration, i discovered a
couple of things critical to getting it working, which the documentation
seems to either be incorrect about, or seems to not mention:


1. First and foremost, even though my MPD config has the setting:

  save_absolute_paths_in_playlists       "no"

  (which is the default), i /did/ in fact need to set the
  emms-player-mpd-music-directory to the location of my Music directory
  (to wit, "~/Music/"). This would mean that playback would fail, as
  emms-player-mpd was sending play requests to MPD with the absolute
  path, rather than a path relative to the value of my MPD
  music_directory variable (i.e. "~/Music"), as MPD required.

  However, chapter 25 of the EMMS Manual states:

  "If you use absolute file names in your m3u playlists (which is most
  likely), make sure you set EMMS-PLAYER-MPD-MUSIC-DIRECTORY to the value
  of 'music_directory' from your MusicPD config."

  and the documentation for the emms-player-mpd-music-directory variable
  states:

  "You need this if your playlists use absolute file names, otherwise
  leave it set to nil."


2. To add all music in my MPD database, such that it was listed in the
  EMMS Browser, i needed to create an active MPD playlist containing all
  music (which i did via ncmpcpp), /then/ do emms-add-directory-tree on
  my Music folder. Unless there's some way of building the EMMS
  track cache directly from the MPD database, that i've missed?


Hope this feedback helps!


Alexis.