Windows 7 and Music Player Daemon

A quick note about how I ran Music Player Daemon on Windows7 and what came of it ...
MPD is a very tiny audio player-daemon that is controlled through a network interface and can broadcast audio in a wide variety of ways that can be easily configured.
Installation was pretty simple.
From the developers site I downloaded the archive with the program, unpacked it into a directory, created subdirectories for storing music files, playlists, music databases and logs and wrote a small configuration file. Some questions arose only about the directory separator (you need to use two forward lines or one back line ) and properly configuring the output audio stream. There are configuration examples for Windows 7 audio devices on the developers wiki.
I got this configuration file mpd.conf:

playlist_directory "d:\\mpd\\playlists"
db_file "d:\\mpd\\database\\mpd.db"
log_file "d:\\mpd\\log\\mp.log"
pid_file "d:\\mpd\\log\\pid"
state_file "d:\\mpd\\log\\state"
bind_to_address "127.0.0.1"
port "6600"
log_level "default"
auto_update "yes"
input {
plugin "curl"
# proxy "proxy.isp.com:8080"
# proxy_user "user"
# proxy_password "password"
}

#audio_output {
# type "httpd"
# name "My HTTP Stream"
## encoder "vorbis" # optional, vorbis or lame
# port "8000"
# bind_to_address "127.0.0.1" # optional, IPv4 or IPv6
# quality "10.0" # do not define if bitrate is defined
## bitrate "512" # do not define if quality is defined
# format "128000:16:2"
#}
#windows multimedia output
audio_output {
type "winmm"
name "Speakers"
# device "Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)"
}
Now you can run MPD with the command:
mpd.exe mpd.conf
If there were no errors in the configuration file, then everything should work. Well, then you can insert this command into autoload or start it manually.
A few more comments. If more than one sound card is installed on the computer, they can be configured separately, and then different cards will receive sound streams with different parameters (by specifying the device parameter), or not. In this case, the audio stream will be broadcast only on one (active) sound card. I sometimes use an external SB Play sound card, and there are no problems with connecting and disconnecting it.
In addition, you can organize the broadcast of the audio stream using the http protocol (I tried this option — these settings are left and commented out in my configuration file), and even broadcast via MPD Web Radio. The program takes 5.5 MB of RAM and almost does not load the processor - my desktop computer uses no more than 1% of processor time.

My mpd client 4

The advantages of MPD are especially pronounced if the musical compositions contain id - mp3 / flac / ogg tags. In this case, you can easily sort them by albums, artists, etc. To manage the music database, play queue and create playlists, special programs are written, called mpd-clients. There are a couple of dozen such client programs. I looked at most of them and even tried them in action. They seemed inconvenient to me, and I decided to write my own client mpd for my own needs.
The main ideas were as follows:
1) Simple interface.
2) The possibility of convenient work on small screens.
3) Convenient and simple navigation through the music database. Normal display of album covers, if they are stored with audio files.
4) Visual work with playlists.
5) Tag Editor. (Not implemented yet)
')
It is written in python / pygtk. With small corrections, this program was launched under Windows, I mostly use it.

The most interesting begins after pressing the [more] button. The window opens and a notebook with tabs appears, which carry out the main work of creating playlists.

useful links

Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki
One of the early descriptions of My mpd client 4