The current MMC4W icon.
MMC4W Released (updated Feb 17, 2024)
I am pleased to announce the release of my Minimal MPD Client for Windows (MMC4W). The installer can be downloaded from Github (here).
MMC4W is a tiny, simple and yet mighty MPD Client. I am really, really happy with how it is coming along.
A little over a year ago I wrote MPD is Just Awesome where I elaborated on the virtues of this wonderful music player daemon. If you don't know, a daemon process is something that runs invisibly in the background.
That's what MPD does. It chugs merrily along receiving and obeying instructions from clients.
One of my favorite Windows clients was Cantata. Unfortunately development stopped on Cantata several years ago. It's still available, and useful, but that can't last forever.
Because of that, I started looking around for alternatives. What I soon discovered was there were a limited number of clients for Windows.
I installed what I could find, and although many of them were very well done, all of them were way more than I needed. I really only wanted to be able to control any of the three instances of MPD I have running in various places on my network. I also wanted something that could be small but still accessible without having to click two or more times to get to it. Nearly every client I tried was also very full-featured. I really don't want the lyrics and artist info for every song. Those apps just didn't appeal to me.
While doing all this research I stumbled upon the knowledge that there existed a couple of Python modules to interface with MPD. That piqued my curiosity. I have a few successful Python apps out there, so it didn't seem a stretch to think I could work up something to meet my need.
And I did. And quite frankly, it's wonderful. Not that I'm biased or anything . . .
So here it is: small, simple, configurable, embedded art able (MPD server must support it), multi-server capable.
MMC4W with the titlebar turned off and Art turned on.
The black part of that pic is my desktop. The app is the two parts you see there. The main app dialog, and the Art window which disappears of you push the Art button. The white field with the track title toggles every three seconds to show a set of useful stats.
Here's what it looks like with the titlebar toggled on and art turned off:
MMC4W with the titlebar turned on and Art turned off.
The main interface window is just 3.5 inches wide on a 4K display, and 4.25 inches wide on a 1080p display. It stays out of my way, and yet is accessible without doing anything most of the time.
I'm not going to list out all the various specs and such here. That stuff is available here and here in the Help text.
I am just going to say: If you run Windows, and you want a small but mighty MPD client, MMC4W just might be the ticket. For me, without a doubt, it is a Thing That Works!
. . . but that's no surprise, is it?
Fully Open Source and free as in beer.
Bored. So bored. So very bored.
Choice and Peers: Two concepts important to this post.
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Image: These people really do exist.