Music Player Daemon

mpd is the one and only. I use its pulse output plugin to directly stream the output from my loud homeserver in the cellar to my raspberry pi, which is connected to the amp. I can handle my whole music-collection from every single device with network access. From android or windows mobile phones with one of the nice clients or per webapp and of course from my laptop with ario.

Good and useful software

Reliable and stable, thanks

I've been using MPD for a few years now, and frankly, it's awesome. It's everything I want it to be, and just gets on with doing its job of playing music, powerfully and flexibly. I have it running on a home server with two soundcards, one hooked up to my amplifier, and one hooked up to my wireless headphones. I also used to have it output to Icecast, but the built-in streaming rendered that unnecessary now. I listen to music nearly all day while working, and when I'm in the office, I listen to my music from there while streaming - my entire music library at my fingertips. I also stream music to my Android phone (using MPDroid) - especially in the summer if I'm out in the garden. Finally, I've used it at many parties - I've written a little webapp to act as a jukebox to allow everyone to queue up songs they want to hear - so with a laptop, USB HDD filled with music, amplifier and speakers, we have an awesome setup letting everyone hear what they want to hear, with fair queuing etc. (Google "DancerJukebox", if you're interested.) It has no problems handling my large music collection, and doesn't try to force me to "import" my music into some odd directory structure of its choosing - I have my music in a directory structure I consider sane and usable, and just tell mpd where it is, and... that's it. The flexibility of letting mpd do its job of playing the music, and control it when required using any client you feel like (even multiple clients at a time with no issues) is just... awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you!