‘An MPD frontend with delusions of grandeur’ — not my words, but those of the GitHub description for Euphonica, a new(ish) Rust-based Linux music player under development.
The developer, Huỳnh Thiện Khiêm, says he created Euphonica to ‘sate’ his own appetite for ‘something that’s got the bling and the features to back that bling up’.
Going off the screenshots shown on the project GitHub (peppered throughout this post1) it certainly offers both.
What is MPD?
MPD (Music Player Daemon) is a server-client audio player long popular with Linux users. The headless daemon runs as a background service, typically on a remote audio server. Music is then accessed via a GUI client frontend, which connects to the MPD server to stream content.
Kind of like running your bespoke, curated music streaming service, in a sense.
MPD’s benefits are low resource usage, extensive configurability, a big focus on playlists, and (obviously) the ability to connect to the server to access your music from a variety of clients, including command-line tools, mobile applications, and even web interfaces.
You don’t need to run MPD on a home audio server, it can be set up locally, on-device too. But the local-only use case has never been the most intuitive of ways to listen to music on a single device, making MPD frontends less popular than a regular desktop music player.
But once it’s up and running, it’s fine.
Euphonica is an MPD Frontend
As you can see from the screenshots here, the heavy focus on album art, animated flourishes, and strong use of blur throughout the user interface is what makes Euphonica stand out and meet its reasons for being. MPD clients don’t usually look this slick.
The UI blur is not a bottleneck in performance either, with the developer noting the “fast, multithreaded, statically-cached background blur [is] powered by libblur‘s stack blur implementation.”
Beyond lush visuals, Euphonica manages to pack a punch in raw functionality, offering many of the features you’d expect, alongside a few you might not:
- Responsive GTK4/libadwaita UI with background blur
- MPRIS integration
- Asynchronous search for large collections
- Browse by album, artist, or folders (supports multi-selection)
- Browse, create, and edit playlists
- Fetch album art, artist avatars and synced lyrics from 3rd party sources
- Spectrum visualiser (reads from MPD FIFO or PipeWire) in player bar
- Audio quality indicators (lossy, lossless, hi-res, DSD)
- Volume knob with dBFS readout support
- UI accent colours derived from album art (optional)
The app also provides an easy-to-navigate set of settings, including ample toggles to tweak the aesthetics; stores MPD passwords in the login keyring; and builds commands into lists for “efficient MPD-side processing”.
The downside, for those on Ubuntu at least, it’s that it is not easy to try Euphonica firsthand. There is no stable or formal Flathub release since it only recently hit beta (so no guarantees of reliability, stability, or feature compatibility).
Nixpkg and AUR builds are available, and the project GitHub walks though using GNOME Builder to compile the app and create a custom Flatpak for installation – if you fancy it, that is.
MPD clients aren’t in short supply on Linux, but rarely do they look as modern as Euphonica. Fans of flashy UIs, who fancy perusing their music collection with style, will want to keep an eye on this.
Also see: Plattenalbum.
- Wondering why many albums have random artwork? The developer chose to replace well-known covers with freely available imagery from Pexels, presumably out of fear of violating copyright? ↩︎