Music Player

Playing music

You are driving a real audio player on the user's machine. Everything you do is heard immediately, by whoever is in the room. That is the whole reason this is worth being careful about: a wrong play_tracks does not produce a wrong answer, it cuts off the song someone was enjoying.

Before anything else

Check that the tools are there. If now_playing and the rest are not available, the MCP server is not connected — see Setting it up and tell the user what to run. Do not fall back to guessing.

If the tools are there but every call reports no daemon at host:port, the CLI is installed but nothing is running. Tell the user to start it:

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music-player          # foreground; add & to keep the shell

How to work

Find, then play. Ids are the currency. search takes free text and hands back track, album and artist ids; browse_library pages through everything when there is nothing specific to look for. Both feed play_tracks and queue_tracks.

Queue rather than replace. queue_tracks adds without touching what is playing. play_tracks wipes the queue and starts over — right when the user says "play X", wrong when they say "add some more like this". When in doubt, queue: an unwanted queue entry is skipped, an unwanted interruption is not recoverable.

Look before you change. Call now_playing first when the request depends on context — "something like this", "more of the same", "after this one". It also tells you whether anything is playing at all, which changes whether you should queue or start.

Say what you did. "Queued 8 tracks" is not an answer. Name a few of them — the user cannot see your tool calls, and the point of asking an agent rather than clicking is that you can say why those tracks.

Knowing what a track sounds like

search and browse_library only know titles. track_analysis knows how a track actually sounds — its tempo, its energy (0 calm to 1 driving), its brightness (-1 dark to 1 bright), and how loud it is. similar_tracks uses all of that to answer "what goes after this?" without needing genres or anyone else's listening history.

None of it works until tracks have been analysed, because analysis means decoding the audio. analyze_library starts a background pass and returns immediately; call it with no arguments to see how far it has got. Run it once for a library, and check it before promising a mood-based set:

• analyze_library with no arguments → {"analyzed": 0, "running": false} means nothing is analysed and similar_tracks will fail. Say so, and offer to start a pass rather than silently falling back to searching by name.
• A pass takes roughly a second per local track and longer for a remote server, since each one has to be fetched. Start it, tell the user it is running, and get on with building a set from what is already there.

Handing over to auto-DJ

auto_dj turns the daemon's own DJ on: it keeps the queue five tracks deep, each one chosen to follow the last by tempo and mood, never repeating and never playing the same artist twice in a row. It never interrupts what is playing.

Steer it rather than micromanaging it. energy, brightness and bpm are a direction, not a filter — the set leans that way over the next few tracks instead of jumping:

• "wind things down" → auto_dj with enabled: true, energy: 0.25
• "keep it going but pick it up" → energy: 0.8
• "something more upbeat and brighter" → energy: 0.75, brightness: 0.6
• "just keep playing" → enabled: true with no target at all
• "stop choosing for me" → enabled: false

Prefer auto-DJ over queueing thirty tracks yourself when the user wants music to keep going indefinitely: it reacts to skips and to a changed target, which a queue you built half an hour ago cannot.

DJing

When asked for a set — "put on something for cooking", "build me an hour of focus music", "DJ for the party" — the work is selection, not tool calls.

• Search around the request, not just inside it. A request for "something upbeat" is not a search query. Look for the artists, genres and albums that would satisfy it, several searches if needed, then choose from what the library actually holds.
• Sequence deliberately. Order is the DJ's contribution: open in the mood asked for, build, and do not put the two most similar tracks back to back. play_tracks and queue_tracks both play in the order given.
• Keep it to a set, not a dump. Ten to twenty well-chosen tracks beats a hundred filtered ones. If the user wants it endless, queue a set and offer to extend it when it runs low.
• Work from their library. You can only play what is there. If the request cannot be met — no jazz in the library at all — say so plainly and offer the nearest thing, rather than queueing something that merely matched a word.
• Use the analysis when the request is about feel. "Something calm", "more energy", "something for running" are questions about tempo and energy, not about titles. Find one track that fits, then similar_tracks from it — that is a far better set than guessing from names.

The tools

connect_server changes where music is browsed from, not where it comes out; it never interrupts playback. Only use it if the user asks for a different server — their library is otherwise whatever is already connected.

Things to get right

• Never clear or replace the queue without being asked. "Play some jazz" while something is on is ambiguous: prefer queueing and say that you queued rather than replaced, so the user can ask for the other thing.
• Volume is heard by people, not read by them. Do not raise it beyond what was asked, and do not set it at all unless asked.
• playback_control with play resumes what is loaded. It starts nothing on an empty queue — use play_tracks for that.
• A tool that returns isError has failed and changed nothing. Read the message and tell the user; do not retry the same call.

Setting it up

Only needed once, and only if the tools are missing.

1. Install the CLI

macOS or Linux, prebuilt binary:

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curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tsirysndr/music-player/master/install.sh | sh

Homebrew (macOS/Linux):

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brew install tsirysndr/tap/musicplayer

npm:

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npm install -g @tsiry/music-player

Debian, Ubuntu and other APT systems:

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echo "deb [trusted=yes] https://apt.fury.io/tsiry/ /" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/music-player.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install music-player

Fedora, RHEL, Rocky, AlmaLinux and other DNF systems:

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sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/music-player.repo <<'EOF'
[music-player]
name=Music Player
baseurl=https://yum.fury.io/tsiry/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF
sudo dnf install music-player

Check it worked with music-player --version.

2. Point it at some music

The daemon reads ~/Music by default; set music_directory in ~/.config/music-player/settings.toml for anywhere else. Then:

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music-player scan     # index the library
music-player          # start the daemon

A remote library — Navidrome, Subsonic, Jellyfin, Plex, Kodi — is added in the desktop or web UI under Servers, and needs no scan.

3. Register the MCP server

Claude Code:

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claude mcp add music-player -- music-player mcp

Codex (~/.codex/config.toml):

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[mcp_servers.music-player]
command = "music-player"
args = ["mcp"]

Claude Desktop, and other hosts that use the same file (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS, %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json on Windows):

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{
  "mcpServers": {
    "music-player": {
      "command": "music-player",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart the host afterwards. music-player mcp speaks JSON-RPC on stdin and stdout and is not meant to be run by hand — running it in a terminal looks like a hang, because it is waiting for a client.