De.Coding

Many people are familiar with the Apple iTunes Remote, an application for the iPhone and iPod touch created by apple to interface with and remotely control (over wifi) the playback from your computer. Unfortunately it only works with iTunes. Until recently this was the only software of its kind I was aware of. I was quite pleased with the software but as a Linux user it was of little use to me. I would sometimes use it when a friend’s computer would be available, but other than that I had to relied on a VNC to remotely control playback from my own computer.

Recently I found an open source alternative to iTunes remote that is media center independent, although it can only remotely control Linux or Unix boxes (developer instructions for windows compilation of the music server are available: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Windows_Compatibility). The software is called MPoD (http://www.katoemba.net/makesnosenseatall/mpod/), is freely distributed through the app store, and has basically all the functionality of the iTunes remote working with a server side program called media player daemon (mpd: www.musicpd.org). Screenshots are available at this last link to show the resemblance. The notable differences are that you need to know the ip address of the computer you’re connecting to (more on this later) and the password for your “music player daemon” in order to connect to your computer, similar to the randomly generated pin for connecting to iTunes via the iTunes remote. The advantage of the password method is that the password is preset, meaning (assuming you have the correct ip address) you can initialize a connection to your media player daemon from you iphone/ipod without ever interacting with your computer.

If you’re as lazy as me, then you’re not going to bother setting up a static IP with your *nix box or want to stand up from wherever you are to go to your computer and check it’s ip address. A workaround I’ve found is to use a hacked ipod/iphone (if you’re running linux I’m going to assume you’ve hacked your iphone/ipod already) with nmap and a terminal program installed (both available through cydia). The music player daemon should be configured to run at startup (either by configuring your run levels or using something like gnome sessions to have it start up at login), and will run on port 6600 by default. The following command will return the ip to the computer running MPD in this default case:

nmap 192.168.1.1-254 -p6600

Just remember to change ‘192.168.1′ to whatever your subnet is.

MPD’s configuration settings are explained and contained in the file /etc/mpd.conf. An configuration tutorial for gentoo (but one that should work for many other distributions as well) is available here: http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/MPD. If you want you can also configure this remote to control your master computer volumn (the iTunes remote controls the internal iTunes volume only), which could be useful when watching a movie or something off hulu at more than arms reach from your computer (say you have a large monitor). If you’re running alsa, which is the case for most linux distributions these days, you can also set the following parameters in the /etc/mpd.conf file to gain master volume control through MPoD:
mixer_type “alsa”
mixer_device “default”
mixer_control “Master”
Apparently MPoD is also compatible with MythTV.

If you end up using this drop by and leave us a message telling us and any future readers what you think.