Serverauditor, a great iOS app

Posted by: nbpf on 13 December 2015

I am not a fan of Apple's iOS but my wife happens to have an iPhone and an iPad and I have been wandering how we could use them to control our MPD music server effectively. I know MPoD, but I find the program hardly usable.

Ideally, I would have liked something like ncmpcpp for iOS. ncmpcpp is, currently, the best software for accessing a music collection, in my view. But it does not run on iOS.

I was about to give up, when I ran into Serverauditor. This is a very nice ssh client. With it, one can connect to a music player, (auto)start ncmpcpp and control MPD remotely. Thanks Serverauditor!

Posted on: 13 December 2015 by garyi

Sounds like you are into pain.

Posted on: 13 December 2015 by nbpf

garyi posted:
Sounds like you are into pain.

I do not know how it sounds but I was not aware of the Serverauditor app and I had been considering buying a cheap tablet just for the purpose of running ncmpcpp on it. Indeed, that would have been a pain: I would have had to rely on android or try to install ubuntu on the tablet. With Serverauditor, I can use the iPad to access and manage my music collection the way I best like. Sounds great to me!

Posted on: 13 December 2015 by garyi

Hey, really I get it. I like to get my fingers dirty occasionally. I run my own router built from a dell PC, I have a server in the garage etc.

But command line just to listen to music is to much hassle for me. There are so many great tools for organising and cataloging music which require nothing more than an admin password to install, it feels like pain to me to have to install a backed MPD, configure it then find client software which seems to have taken you a long time just to use it.

But hey ho.

Posted on: 14 December 2015 by nbpf

garyi posted:
But command line just to listen to music is to much hassle for me. There are so many great tools for organising and cataloging music which require nothing more than an admin password to install, it feels like pain to me to have to install a backed MPD, configure it then find client software which seems to have taken you a long time just to use it.

Right, it all depends on subjective preferences. I have installed and configured MPD on a low-power, fanless mini-server about two years ago and since then it has been up and running 7/24. I have tried different graphical MPD clients and played around with UPnP servers and with the Naim app. I have found MPD-based solutions both simpler and more elegant than streaming solutions based on UPnP. Cantata and GMPC are quite usable MPD clients but MPoD is awkward and I tend to prefer ncmpcpp to all of them. This is what I mainly use from my notebook. It is fast, sleek and, in my view, has the best UI for browsing and searching I have seen so far. It was annoying not to be able to run ncmpcpp on the iPad. Serverauditor turned out to be a simple and straightforward solution. I can now browse and search my music collection the way I like to do it from an iPad. The only limitation is that I cannot open the booklet of the album that is currently played on the iPad. I am probably a dead duck when it comes to iOS, I did not know they had such nice ssh clients ... Best, nbpf