edit: I have gotten used to simply enabling the shuffle and adding my songs when I start up rmpc. Interestingly enough, when you press play with randomise on, it selects a random song just like that! Much faster compared to selecting the first song before enabling randomise, then using the hotkey for going to the next track to get a random song.
Having the speakers muted by default means loud music won’t be broadcasted to everyone when my headphones disconnect, and that works well enough for me given that I don’t regularly use my laptop speakers anyways.
original post:
I love MPD and RMPC, it’s probably the closest I have gotten to a “perfect” music player, it is super customisable and functional, but there are just a few things that I need to figure out how to change.
First, after each restart, the queue is cleared. How do I make sure that the queue by default is all the songs in my music directory?
Second, after each restart, shuffle (randomise) is reset to off, how do I change it so that shuffle is enabled by default?
Thirdly, is there a way to make MPD pause when headphones are disconnected?
Finally, how do I make MPD block screen lock when music is playing?
For your information, I am running EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma
When I first switched to Linux, I needed to find a suitable alternative to AIMP on Windows.
At the time I was running Fedora Workstation, so I first tried options that fit the GNOME desktop. The libadwaita apps I tried (G4Music, Amberol, etc) all suffered similar issues to do with shuffle, where it wasn’t able to just go to a random track, instead ordering all the tracks randomly once and having a fixed queue. Amberol in particular had bad shuffling, only randomising all the tracks below the one currently playing (so the ones above are unchanged, which is stupid I think). I ended up using Tauon, which had a workable shuffle but admittedly less nice UI. I also remember that Tauon was not very configurable.
Next, I switched to KDE Plasma, so I ended up using Elisa, which fit the KDE desktop, had nicer UI than Tauon, but suffered from the same shuffle issue as the libadwaita apps, so I had to occasionally reshuffle the music to get consistently random tracks.
Having recently switched to EndeavourOS and really getting into the weeds of command line stuff, I decided to try using MPD and the client RMPC (suggested by Bread on Penguins). For god knows what reason, it’s the only option that has proper good shuffle that’s just randomly going to each track (besides Tauon and, on Windows, AIMP), and it is easily the most customisable. RMPC has excellent documentation making changing the configs super easy!