Use a mpd database as metadata source for media providers

Feature description:

Symfonium comes with the ability to use many different media providers to stream the media from. When doing so, Symfonium starts by indexing the contents of the media provider to build a usable library allowing navigation based on metadata.
It would be great if Symfonium would support the use of a mpd database to gather the metadata instead of collecting those itself.

It would basically come in the form of an extra field to fill in when adding a media provider.
Those fields would be

  • Tickbox “use mpd database as metadata provider for this source”
  • text input field for the mpd server
  • text input field for the mpd port
  • text input for the mpd username
  • hidden password input for the mpd password
  • text input to indicate the mpd database root path relative to the media provider path.

Problem solved:

It would reduce network bandwidth usage and ensure an up to date metadata db with minimal overhead.

Brought benefits:

As mpd runs on the media provider and keeps its metadata updated on a regular basis, supporting this feature would reduce the network traffic between the media provider and symfonium for the initial metadata collection. Symfonium wouldn’t need to parse each file individually (with the cpu/bandwidth/memory overhead in processing that comes with it) and could readilly use the already parsed metadata directly from mympd.

Other application solutions:

 
mpd supports using a remote mpd server as database source.

In this scenario, one would run a mpd server which provides the database on its nas. He could then use satellite mpd players running on other devices like raspberry pi’s to play the music and have them rely on the nas mpd server for the database, avoiding the requirement for each satellite to do its own parsing of the songs to build the db.
 

Additional description and context:

 

 

Screenshots / Mockup:

    

This would be a very very niche need that does not really bring much benefits except removing all control from Symfonium about the tag parsing.