mvc

Minimal MPD music visualizer, based on curses. Works by reading the fifo output of an MPD instance. Now with real-time beat detection and display!

Requirements

ncurses and GCC (or another C99 compatible compiler).

Optional: libmpdclient to display current status (song / elapsed time / etc).

The fifo output of MPD needs to be enabled. To do so, simply place this in your mpd.conf:

audio_output {
    type                    "fifo"
    name                    "my_fifo"
    path                    "/tmp/mpd.fifo"
    format                  "44100:16:1"
}

Building

Clone the repo:

git clone https://fragal.eu/git/fra/mvc
cd mvc/

Build with status display (requires libmpdclient):

make all

Note: without libmpdclient installed, this is equivalent to 'make nostatus'.

Build without status display (without libmpdclient):

make nostatus

Install (to /usr/local/bin/):

sudo make install

Usage

An instance of MPD must be running for mvc to work.

From a console / terminal emulator:

mvc

Keybindings

• Quitting: q.
• Change drawing mode (style): Space bar
• Move status panel (if built with libmpdclient): up / down / left / right keys
• Reset status panel position: r
• Toggle status display: t
• Toggle beat display: s
• Print help: h

Configuration

Editing settings.h allows the configuration of:

• Host, Port, Timeout and DB location of the mpd instance
• Timeout for the connection to mpd to fail
• Number of samples taken each read
• Adaptive sampling on / off: whether to adapt the number of samples to the current sample rate. Might give fairly accurate results with high rates (> 96000 Hz)
• Location of the MPD named pipe (fifo) from which mvc reads.
• Seconds in between each status refresh
• Niceness: number of reads to be skipped cyclically (reduces load on the cpu)
• Y_Correction: integer value to be subtracted to the components in case the height of the screen wasn't sufficient
• X_Correction: lateral shift in case the visualized spectrum is not perfectly aligned with the center of the screen.