How to set up on windows

[TheReiko69]

Recently I wanted to start using MPD on windows because I thought it would be cool to do so. I have tried my best to look at the documentation of how you would go about setting up MPD to work on windows but I honestly cant wrap my head around it. The only thing I can find within the documentation itself is how to compile it for windows, not really much so of how to go about setting it up and using it. Which is what I would like to learn.

[MaxKellermann]

True, the manual is missing that part, and somebody[tm] should write something.
On Windows, you start MPD just like you'd do on Linux: start mpd.exe, optionally with the usual command-line arguments.

[TheReiko69]

doing mpd --no-config ends up returning with exception: config parameter 'log_file' not found

[MaxKellermann]

Oh, that's a confusing error indeed. That happens only on Windows, because there's no default logging destination on Windows; but you can tell MPD to log to the console with --stdout, and that should fix this problem.
Please report a bug on this confusing behavior.

[TheReiko69]

adding --stdout to the command mpd --no-config gave me this output. still not working.

decoder: Decoder plugin 'wildmidi' is unavailable: configuration file does not exist: /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg output: No 'audio_output' defined in config file output: Successfully detected a jack audio device exception: Failed to load libjack64.dll: The specified module could not be found. : Unknown error

I will make a bug report on this.

[rockymystic]

hopefully someone can detail out how to install on windows successfully, i tried couple of methods none of them worked

[PablexXXXX]

You can install lobjack64 from https://jackaudio.org/downloads/

[andzejsp]

has anyone figured this out?

[skidoo23]

KISS ;) Get precompiled mpd.exe and create mpd.conf - https://mpd.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_Compatibility#Native you need at least music_directory and audio_output.

[mcbp223]

I have a weird permission issue I think, when running mpd as a service it creates the log file but can't write in it, however when I run it from an administrative command prompt, it does output log data in the file. Any suggestion on folder permissions, or other location for the log file?

I'm testing on Windows 11, with precompiled x64 mpd.exe in C:\Windows\ and mpd.conf in C:\ProgramData\mpd\ with these entries:

music_directory		"C:\\Users\\pc\\Music"
playlist_directory	"C:\\ProgramData\\mpd\\playlists"
db_file			"C:\\ProgramData\\mpd\\database"
log_file		"C:\\Windows\\Logs\\mpd\\mpd.log"
state_file		"C:\\ProgramData\\mpd\\state"
sticker_file		"C:\\ProgramData\\mpd\\sticker.sql"

# An example of a winmm output (Windows multimedia API).
#
audio_output {
	type		"winmm"
	name		"My WinMM output"
##	device		"Digital Audio (S/PDIF) (High Definition Audio Device)" # optional
#		or
##	device		"0"		# optional
##	mixer_type	"hardware"	# optional
}

I gave full permissions to the LOCAL SERVICE account over the C:\Windows\Logs\mpd\ folder.
The service was created in an administrative command prompt with
sc create mpd binPath= "C:\Windows\mpd.exe" DisplayName= "Music Player Daemon"
and it didn't need any wrapper on Windows 11, haven't tested it on other versions.