MPD Discord RPC

Displays your currently playing song / album / artist from MPD in Discord using Rich Presence, along with the album art.

It includes support for multiple MPD hosts if, like me, you have more than one server you alternate between.

The program does not require MPD or Discord to be running in order to run.

Once installed just run mpd-discord-rpc.

Installation

Cargo

The cargo package can be found here.

cargo install mpd-discord-rpc

Arch Linux

Two AUR packages are available:

• mpd-discord-rpc
• mpd-discord-rpc-git

The systemd unit is included and can be started with:

systemctl --user enable --now mpd-discord-rpc

NixOS

You can use the mpd-discord-rpc package in nixpkgs. Users of home-manager can also use the services.mpd-discord-rpc.enable option.

Many thanks to Ilan Joselevich for maintaining both of those.

Configuration

Running the program once will generate a default configuration file. On Linux this will be at ~/.config/discord-rpc/config.toml

• id - The Discord application ID to run through.
• hosts - An array of MPD server host socket addresses. Each one will be tried in order until a playing server is found.
• format - Format strings. Tokens are listed below.
  • details - A format string for the top line. This is the song title by default.
  • state - A format string for the second line. This is the artist / album by default.
  • timestamp - The timestamp mode for the third line. This is 'elapsed' by default. Can be one of both, elapsed, left or off. Falls back to both.
  • large_image - The name of the rich presence asset that gets displayed as the large image. This is "notes" by default. Setting this to "" disables the large image.
  • small_image - The name of the rich presence asset that gets displayed as the small image. This is "notes" by default. Setting this to "" disables the small image.
  • large_text - A format string that is displayed upon hovering the large image. Setting this to "" disables the hover.
  • small_text - A format string that is displayed upon hovering the small image. Setting this to "" disables the hover.
  • display_type - The type of content to display in the status. Can be one of name, state or details. Defaults to state.

Formatting Tokens

Any part of the format string that does not match one of these tokens will be displayed as is. The following will automatically be replaced with their value from MPD:

• $title
• $album
• $artist
• $albumartist
• $date
• $track
• $disc
• $genre
• $duration
• $elapsed

Default Configuration

This configuration file is automatically generated if one does not exist. It is included here for reference.

id = 677226551607033903
hosts = ["localhost:6600"]

[format]
details = "$title"
state = "$artist / $album"
timestamp = "both"
large_image = "notes"
small_image = "notes"
large_text = ""
small_text = ""
display_type = "name"

Album art

Album art is pulled from the MusicBrainz database and Album Art Archive automatically. You'll only get a cover if it can be found though; there's a couple of things you can do to help this:

• Make sure your music is sensibly tagged. In most cases MusicBrainz will be searched for releases matching the album/artist name.
• Add MusicBrainz release tags to your tracks. This is officially supported by MPD and can be done automatically using MusicBrainz Picard.
• Add missing album art to MusicBrainz. Many albums are missing covers, and you can upload your own to the database to contribute these for everyone.