Cantata, yet another client for the music player daemon (MPD), now is at version 1.5.0 which brings lots of new features, improvements and fixes.

Cantata is a MPD client originally started as a fork of QtMPC, it can be compiled with KDE support, or as a pure Qt4 application.

Cantata works on Linux and Windows. Since 1.5.0 release, it adds support for Mac OS X.

According to the changelog, The 1.5.0 release brings below changes:

• Remove cover size setting, set automatically.
• Artist images only shown in grid view.
• No images, or icons, shown in basic tree view.
• Remove GUI option to control saving of scaled covers. This is enabled by default, and can be toggled via the config file.
• Don’t re-load view when sort changes.
• Simplify view config pages.
• Use QUrl with server details to build HTTP address used to compare MPD http file paths against.
• Store song ratings in MPD’s sticker DB. Ratings stored using ‘rating’ key and values 0 to 10. In the UI, ratings are show as 5 stars.
• If we fail to download a cover, don’t keep trying next time song is played.
• Simplify toolbar cover widget, no border.
• Allow preference dialog to shrink smaller. If screen size is less than 800px, then views page is re-arranged to allow much smaller dialog, category selector uses smaller icons, and headers are removed.. You can check this setting by calling cantata as follows: CANTATA_NETBOOK=1 cantata
• Support MPDs “find modified-since” with MPD 0.19 and newer. If a number is entered it is taken to be ‘modified since X days in past’, otherwise a date should be entered (e.g. 01/12/2001 to find all tracks since 1st Dec 2001) Cantata will first try to convert from your locale date format, default date format, and then ISO date format.
• Show covers in search results.
• Show performer in cover tooltip if this is set and different to album artist.
• Always large action icons for grid view.
• Increase gap between add and play icons in grid view.
• Disable volume fade on stop by default – this is really something MPD itself should implement.
• Remove ‘Add albums in random order’ from view context menus.
• Reorganize playqueue context menu.
• Use ‘Metadata’ and not ‘Tags’ as metadata/tags view in context song pane.
• Minor changes to song progress slider.
• Show covers in playlist tree and list views.
• Use read-only editable combo for filename in tag editor, so that text can be selected.
• Also read /com/canonical/desktop/interface/scrollbar-mode to determine if overlay scrollbars have been disabled.
• Add note about ‘AlbumArtist’ tag to initial settings wizard.
• Use QDesktopWidget::logicalDpiX()/96.0 to set DPI scale factor.
• Expand ~/ to QDir::homePath() when read from UI.
• Save QDir::homePath()/ as ~ in config file, and convert when read.
• Allow all bar title and artist columns to be hidden in playqueue.
• Add option to disable song info tooltips.
• Only show icons in message widget buttons if style uses icons for dialog buttons.
• Add option to have separate play queue search action – enabled by default.
• Revert back to storing scaled covers as JPG. PNG is taking too much space, especially with retina displays.
• Read ArtistSort, AlbumArtistSort, and AlbumSort from MPD. If found, use these to sort items.
• Add ‘Full Refresh’ action – cuases caches to be removed, and models to be completely refreshed.
• Add actions to mark podcast as episode as listened or new.
• Add action to cancel podcast downloads.
• Download podcasts sequentially.
• Configurable limit to auto podcast downloading.
• When starting, remove any previous partial podcast downloads.
• Don’t make media keys backend configurable, auto detect the best one.
• Remove Gtk combo popup size hack.
• Fix Qt5 translations.
• Add button to status bar to eanble/disable playback of MPD HTTP output stream.
• Show notification when outputs changed.
• Connect MPRIS stopAfterCurrent signal to correct action.
• Add prev/play/pause/etc actions to Unity launcher, and to windows taskbar entry.
• Fix current track highlight in grouped view under windows for header item.
• Use same selection drawing for all views.
• Fix size of collapsed window in windows builds.
• If run under Unity or OSX, then place close buttons on left.
• Fix auto-marking of played downloaded podcasts when connected via a local socket.
• Fix playback of local files by inbuilt HTTP server.
• In catata-tags.exe set unhandled exception handler, to prevent windows crash dialog appearing.
• If a command fails to be sent to MPD, and the socket is in an error state, then reconnect and update status and playqueue.
• For windows builds, when window is not focused, draw sidebar selection as a darkened background.
• If MPD supports https, then there is no need to convert SoundCould URLs.
• If playlist is loaded and replaces playqueue, then start playback of first track.
• Custom/thin scrollbars for context view.
• If fail to read a Gtk setting from DConf then try GSettings.
• Send a message (default to ‘status’) at least once every 30 seconds to keep command connection alive.
• Fix inconsistent default cover sizes.
• French translation – thanks to Jaussoin Timothée.
• Seek 5seconds when control (or command for Mac) and lef/right arrow keys are pressed. (Seek setting may be changed via config file – refer to README for more details.)

Install / Upgrade Cantata in Ubuntu:

The latest binaries of KDE build have been made into PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and derivatives.

If you have already added the PPA and installed a previous version, just run system update via Software Updater will bring you to Cantata 1.5.0.

If not, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal, run commands below one by one to add the PPA and install the MPD client:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/cantata

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install cantata

Or you can grab the .deb installer directly from the Launchpad page.

That’s it. Enjoy!