Returning to Music Player Daemon - Cantata vs Mpdevil

A while ago I tried Music Player Daemon (MPD) with my music, but found it wouldn't see half my collection and I gave up on it. That was a long time ago so I recently decided to try it again to see if it had improved and also I have recently been getting annoyed with usual music players, Clementine and Strawberry. Clementine is basically no longer maintained but it's one of few players that can cope with 80 thousand tracks! And it has a nice Android app to control it from my phone. But it's got some annoying bugs that will never be fixed so I have been trying to look for alternatives. Strawberry is a fork of Clementine but doesn't fix the bugs that bother me and there's no Android app for it, so I decided to give MPD another go since I haven't tried MPD for years.

This time when I installed MPD, I made sure it ran properly as my user rather than its own user, with the config in my Home folder. And this time it seems to see all my collection, and has clearly improved since I last tried it.  I used the brilliant guide on the Arch wiki and adapted it for KDE Neon (a distro of sorts based on Kubuntu but with latest KDE). Most of the guides I used before were for Ubuntu but usually they would create an MPD user, which is where the problems had begun.  Apart from setting the music directory, I have enabled Replaygain for audio normalisation. The sound was also distorting slightly on my desktop machine without Replaygain enabled. I haven't yet worked out how to make MPD run on startup in KDE, I usually just run it in my favourite drop-down terminal, Yakuake. Edit: you can set mpd to run automatically by adding it as a service with this command: systemctl --user enable mpd.service

The great thing about MPD is it runs in the background consuming very little resources, and then you control it with a front-end of your choice, either lightweight or heavy and control it from anywhere on the local network. At first it had problems choosing the right soundcard, as I use a USB interface, but changing it to use Pulseaudio instead of ALSA fixed that. One slight annoyance with MPD is it does not remember the previously played track or playlist the next time MPD is started.

This time round, after looking round at other front-ends, I ended up choosing Cantata as it seemed to be the best of thea KDE friendly apps, it works well  apart from the 16,000 track limit on playlists is a bit annoying. I have now got into a habit of just listening to albums in full or all of one artist etc, whereas in Clementine I would just have all my 80,000+ in a single playlist on Shuffle! 

I then discovered Mpdevil, which although a fairly simple player, it looks more modern than Cantata. I have Mpdevil running nicely on my main desktop and my main laptop, both are running KDE Neon (a distro based on Kubuntu but with the very latest KDE version). I also have MPD on my old Dell Vostro, which runs Manjaro,

One very noticeable difference between the two is that Cantata has a "locate in Library" option in the right click menu whereas Mpdevil only has the option of "Show" which locates the track in the file manager which is far less useful to me. I usually want to find the album a track is from and play it. 

Mpdevil 'Show' which opens a location in a file manager

Cantata 'Locate In Library' which shows where the track is in the app.

One other thing I really like in Cantata is it's easier to find and switch between MPD servers in the settings with it's Discover button. It isn't as simple to do that with Mpdevil. 

Mpdevil is basically a more minimal player, it lacks Last.fm support and, as far as i can tell, doesn't fetch missing covers, whereas Cantata has both of those features. As far as I know, there isn't an easy way to get Scrobbling in the MPD backend itself so it's useful to have that in the front-end. If you want a great looking player and don't need advanced features, mpdevil does the job fine but if you need the advanced features, Cantata does a better job, so I will stick with Canatata for now. I am open to suggestions though for an even better KDE-friendly MPD client. 

Sharing Files and Notifications between Android and Linux with KDE Connect

Google's Nearby Share function appears to be is almost ready but on Linux there's already an easy way to share files on the local network between Android and Linux and to other Linux desktops using KDE Connect (and GSconnect on Gnome, but I'll be concentrating on KDE). And of course unlike Nearby Share, it doesn't require Google Chrome to be open all the time and is more than just a file sharing tool. 

KDE Connect is usually installed by default in KDE, (or in the repositories if it isn't) and then it's just a case of installing the app in Android and pairing them up. A persistent notification is usually required to keep it active and a few permissions to allow it to send notifications and send files etc.  

Sending files from KDE to another device, such as your phone, is as simple as navigating through the Send To menu of Dolphin (KDE's file manager) and choosing the right device.  

And on Android there's a KDE Connect item in its sharing menu. And you get notifications at both ends of file transfer progress and completion.

KDE Connect is not only useful for sharing files but also, amongst other things, for mirroring your phones notifications on your desktop, (and/or the other way), controlling multimedia shortcuts from Android, as a Remote input device (use your phone as a mouse and keyboard) and send custom commands to your desktop.   

Android notifications pop up on the desktop just like the local toast notifications.

KDE Connect also shows the battery status of connected Android devices  

Sending files from Android to KDE drops them in your Home folder. 

Although Clementine music player actually has it's own app for controlling from Android, I usually prefer to use KDE Connect instead. 

 

Remote Input allows you to control your KDE desktop using your phone as a trackpad and keyboard.

Run Command allows you to run various common commands to your desktop and you can add custom commands too. Plenty of useful preset commands (like shutdown, reboot etc) and also some interesting custom commands too, lots of possibilities - there's a full list of commands here. From that list, I've added a command to take a desktop screenshot and send it to my phone. 

I am surprised that KDE Connect (and the Gnome equivalent) isn't written about more often, as it's such a useful tool, I find it particularly for showing notifications from my phone and controlling the media keys. I often find it much more convenient to use it to send photos from my phone to my desktop rather than plugging it in and dragging and dropping them. There are also early builds for Windows and Mac OS, amongst others, if you have those on your local network, and you can find them and more builds on the KDE Connect site. I have been using it on KDE for a long while now, when I moved back to KDE from XFCE, and it just keeps getting better with every release.

Kubuntu 16.04 Pre-Release Review

I was getting a bit tired of Mint KDE 17.3 on my main HP Z400 workstation (Quad core 2.5Ghz Xeon, 6GB RAM) like the way it holds back updates, plus for some reason it has been feeling rather sluggish and the final straw was Mint's user forum and main site getting hacked. If I cannot get help through their forum without them exposing my personal details then I will look elsewhere. The question was which distro should I try?

Well I wanted to stick with KDE and switch pretty quickly. I did consider Kaos Linux which is an interesting ground-up built distro that uses the package system and rolling release method from Arch. However having tried it in a VM, I would have had to spend a lot of time researching how to get all my favourite apps to install, and I needed to switch quicker than that. I'd also probably have to backup and format my Home partition. Plus 'bleeding-edge' distros are not really my cup of tea, I prefer stability over the latest apps. I know my way round apt-get and dpkg commands so well, I decided to go for Kubuntu 16.04. However since the final release is not due until the mid-April, I took a risk and installed a Daily build. This also made things easier because I could keep my old Home partition, so all my settings (bar the KDE ones) would stay, and I won't have to reinstall when 16.04 is finally released.

Installing took no time at all, as per previous releases, and the install went without a hitch. Upon rebooting I logged into the new KDE Plasma 5 desktop. By default on Nvidia cards 'buntu releases run using the open source Nouveau drivers, which are surprisingly good, apart from slightly fuzzy font rendering, but I could use it on my dual monitors fine while I sorted out getting the proprietary drivers installed. I tried installing the latest drivers manually using the PPA, but ended up with blank screens, until I remembered that my card is an old passive-cooled Geforce 210! Since Kubuntu's Driver Management Module doesn't see the old Legacy cards, I checked on NVidia's site which ones I needed, installed Synaptic, and looked for the nvidia-340 drivers. Once I installed them and rebooted all was well again. I then installed all my usual apps such as Gimp, Gmusicbrowser, Clementine, VLC etc. I also installed a couple of meta-packages, kubuntu-restricted-extras (for extra non-free codecs etc) and build-essential (for compiling apps).

The only remnants of my old settings I had to fix was some of the Places in Dolphin file manager were orphaned (since I changed the mount point of one of my drives) so it was just a case of editing those in the sidebar. Incidentally, I like the cleaned up look of Dolphin now, just remember that a lot of settings are now under the "Control" button.

My only slight problems are with virtual machines. Virtualbox won't install as it has dependency issues and (my admittedly old version of) VMWare Workstation needs patching again due to a newer kernel than it expects.I am sure these will be sorted at some point but it's not too much of a problem since I can always try VMs on my server (which has much more RAM anyway) and remote into them. Also I had to re-enable bash auto-completion which is not on by default for some reason.

I have changed the hideous Kubuntu default wallpaper for a couple of my favourites. It would be nice if KDE could span one wallpaper between two desktops, but KDE treats each workspace as separate. I have also tweaked the desktop/panel layout, switched the Desktop Theme from the default Breeze Light to Breeze Dark and installed Conky, so this is how my desktop looks now:

One thing I really love in Plasma 5 is the new Media Player widget, which now even recognises Gmusicbrowser, which it never did before, oh and the keyboard media buttons now actually work with Gmusicbrowser! Hovering over the widget on the panel shows artist/song info and album cover, clicking on the widget opens up the media controls. It might not seem like much but it's little things like this make things easier. Incidentally, Clementine player still uses a lot of resources - it is the top item in CPU and Memory usage in System Monitor, above Chrome!

 
The main thing I love about Kubuntu 16.04 is it's speed, it feels lightning fast compared to my old Mint KDE installation, even on a mechanical hard drive. Chrome feels really snappy, even with quite a few tabs open. Being a Daily build, there's a whole bunch of updates to install every day, when I login and even though it's still in beta, it is really stable, I've not had any application crashes yet, so hopefully it should be rock solid when it is finally released.

Update 6th March 2016
There's been a few little crashes, including once with Plasma desktop crashing and another with mouse settings, but nothing that a quick logout/login or reboot hasn't cured. Being a pre-release there are bound to be a few little bugs so I wouldn't recommend putting on mission critical situations until the final release, but at least there's not too long to wait.