Crystal MPD

A desktop MPD client written in Crystal using a forked Qt6 shard.

Screenshots

Features

• Playback controls: play/pause, previous, next
• Interactive progress slider with elapsed and total time display
• Shuffle and repeat toggles
• Live title, artist, and album metadata updates
• Window title updates to reflect the current track
• Album art loading when available from MPD
• Playlist view with current-track indicator icons
• Double-click a playlist row to start playback
• Connection settings dialog for MPD host and port
• Settings are saved in the user config directory

Requirements

• Crystal >= 1.19.1
• Qt6 Widgets development packages
  • Arch: pacman -S qt6-base
  • Ubuntu: apt-get install qt6-base-dev
• A running MPD server

Installation

git clone https://github.com/mamantoha/mpd-qt6
cd mpd-qt6
shards install
shards build --release
./bin/mpd-qt6

Dependencies

Forked Qt6 shard

This project currently uses a forked version of crystal-qt6 through a local path dependency during development.

Features implemented in the fork

The custom additions include:

• main-thread invocation support via Qt meta-object dispatch
• loading icons from the active desktop theme
• slider pressed and released callbacks
• setting images on labels
• label alignment support
• pixmap scaling with aspect-ratio preservation
• table widget item double-click callbacks
• table widget item icon support
• native add_stretch support for box layouts

Platform support

Tested on Linux with Qt6. macOS and Windows are untested.

Architecture notes

• One MPD client handles commands and status reads
• A separate callback-enabled MPD listener pushes live updates from the server
• UI updates are marshalled safely onto the Qt main thread through a signal-style bridge
• Playback and playlist controls are built with Qt widgets such as push buttons, sliders, and table views

License

MIT