MPD and Apple Lossless on OS X

Today I noticed that loads of songs were missing from the mpd library on my Mac. It turned out they were all encoded in Apple Lossless/ALAC format, which mpd can’t play unless you build it with ffmpeg support.

Here’s how to get mpd with Apple Lossless support on a Mac running Mac OS X Lion, using the Homebrew package manager:

If it’s not installed already, grab ffmpeg:

brew install --use-gcc ffmpeg

Edit the mpd formula:

brew edit mpd

This will open the Homebrew formula for mpd in your text editor of choice. You need to add ffmpeg to the list of dependencies, like so:

depends_on 'ffmpeg'

Then, enable ffmpeg in the args list:

"--enable-ffmpeg",

The finished formula should look something like this.

Next, (re)install mpd

brew install --force mpd

If it’s your first time installing mpd, ditch that --force flag, write a config file (~/.mpdconf by default) and create the directories and files mentioned therein. Here’s my config:

music_directory         "/Volumes/Music/"
playlist_directory      "~/.mpd/playlists"
db_file                 "~/.mpd/db"
log_file                "~/.mpd/mpd.log"
pid_file                "~/.mpd/mpd.pid"
state_file              "/.mpd/mpd.state"
auto_update             "no"

audio_output {
    type            "osx"
    name            "My Mac Device"
    mixer_type      "software"
}

Finally, (re)start mpd and update your library:

mpd --kill
mpd
mpc update

Bingo! Apple Lossless files will now show up in your mpd client, and play without a hitch.

Hi-Res ALAC on iPhone

So apparently, iPhones (and other iThings) don’t play files with high sample rates—not exactly sure what the ceiling is, but 88.2 KHz is too high, which blows, and I can’t find any documentation on Apple. It’s irritating because iTunes plays them just fine. I have been playing them over AirPlay, and this is another downer, but apparently AirPlay downconverts everything to ALAC 16-bit/44.x KHz anyway. I’ll just have to hook the amp directly to the computer. Inconvenient.