From Music Player Daemon Community Wiki

[edit] What MPD Is and What MPD is not

[edit] MPD Is

• A server.
• A queue and control for your music.
  • Can be controlled through various clients over TCP.

• A music file decoder for various open source audio input plugins, which outputs to various output plugins, simultaneously if requested.

• A volume control.
  • It is limited to one physical output at a time.

• A HTTP input.
  • an http website url can be an input on the queue, or played directly (supported filetypes only).

[edit] MPD is not

• An album art protocol.
  • Though there are many Clients which support album art.

• An inotify client.
  • There are many capable inotify clients which can update your MPD

• A music tagger.
  • Though there are many taggers, such as EasyTag, which are more than capable of tagging your music.

• A text parser.
  • It will not parse your playlist files, though it will parse its own playlist files and various clients can parse yours, though not all clients.

• A remote file server.
  • Though OpenAFS, NFS, sshfs, samba and many other network file systems are more than capable.

• A protocol to send music output to your client.
  • Though pulseaudio and icecast are more than capable.

• A statistics server.
  • This would be better accomplished by a companion server. We follow the KISS principle here.

• A video server.
  • This is not the intention and it's not practical for MPD to be a video server. Something more along the lines of Video Lan Client or nxserver would probably be a great alternative if looking to control and view video remotely.

• A music visualization output.
  • Visualization should be done on the Client side, see KISS principle.