Configuration

Mopidy has a lot of config values you can tweak, but you only need to change a few to get up and running. A complete ~/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf may be as simple as this:

[mpd]
hostname = ::

[spotify]
username = alice
password = mysecret

Mopidy primarily reads config from the file ~/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf, where ~ means your home directory. If your username is alice and you are running Linux, the config file should probably be at /home/alice/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf. You can either create the configuration file yourself, or run the mopidy command, and it will create an empty config file for you and print what config values must be set to successfully start Mopidy.

When you have created the configuration file, open it in a text editor, and add the config values you want to change. If you want to keep the default for a config value, you should not add it to ~/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf.

To see what’s the effective configuration for your Mopidy installation, you can run mopidy config. It will print your full effective config with passwords masked out so that you safely can share the output with others for debugging.

You can find a description of all config values belonging to Mopidy’s core below, together with their default values. In addition, all extensions got additional config values. The extension’s config values and config defaults are documented on the extension pages.

Migrating from pre 0.14

For those users upgrading from versions prior to 0.14 we made the mopidy-convert-config tool, to ease the process of migrating settings to the new config format.

Default core configuration

[logging]
console_format = %(levelname)-8s %(message)s
debug_format = %(levelname)-8s %(asctime)s [%(process)d:%(threadName)s] %(name)s\n  %(message)s
debug_file = mopidy.log
config_file =

[audio]
mixer = software
mixer_track =
mixer_volume =
output = autoaudiosink
visualizer =

[proxy]
scheme =
hostname =
port = 
username =
password =

Core configuration values

audio/mixer

Audio mixer to use.

Expects a GStreamer mixer to use, typical values are: software, autoaudiomixer, alsamixer, pulsemixer, ossmixer, and oss4mixer.

The default is software, which does volume control inside Mopidy before the audio is sent to the audio output. This mixer does not affect the volume of any other audio playback on the system. It is the only mixer that will affect the audio volume if you’re streaming the audio from Mopidy through Shoutcast.

If you want to use a hardware mixer, try autoaudiomixer. It attempts to select a sane hardware mixer for you automatically. When Mopidy is started, it will log what mixer autoaudiomixer selected, for example:

INFO     Audio mixer set to "alsamixer" using track "Master"

Setting the config value to blank turns off volume control.

audio/mixer_volume

Initial volume for the audio mixer.

Expects an integer between 0 and 100.

Setting the config value to blank leaves the audio mixer volume unchanged. For the software mixer blank means 100.

audio/mixer_track

Audio mixer track to use.

Name of the mixer track to use. If this is not set we will try to find the master output track. As an example, using alsamixer you would typically set this to Master or PCM.

audio/output

Audio output to use.

Expects a GStreamer sink. Typical values are autoaudiosink, alsasink, osssink, oss4sink, pulsesink, and shout2send, and additional arguments specific to each sink. You can use the command gst-inspect-0.10 to see what output properties can be set on the sink. For example: gst-inspect-0.10 shout2send

audio/visualizer

Visualizer to use.

Can be left blank if no visualizer is desired. Otherwise this expects a GStreamer visualizer. Typical values are monoscope, goom, goom2k1 or one of the libvisual visualizers.

logging/console_format

The log format used for informational logging.

See the Python logging docs for details on the format.

logging/debug_format

The log format used for debug logging.

See the Python logging docs for details on the format.

logging/debug_file

The file to dump debug log data to when Mopidy is run with the mopidy --save-debug-log option.

logging/config_file

Config file that overrides all logging config values, see the Python logging docs for details.

loglevels/*

The loglevels config section can be used to change the log level for specific parts of Mopidy during development or debugging. Each key in the config section should match the name of a logger. The value is the log level to use for that logger, one of debug, info, warning, error, or critical.

proxy/hostname

Proxy server to use for communication with the Internet.

Currently only used by the Spotify extension.

proxy/username

Username for the proxy server, if needed.

proxy/password

Password for the proxy server, if needed.

Extension configuration

Mopidy’s extensions have their own config values that you may want to tweak. For the available config values, please refer to the docs for each extension. Most, if not all, can be found at Extensions.

Mopidy extensions are enabled by default when they are installed. If you want to disable an extension without uninstalling it, all extensions support the enabled config value even if it isn’t explicitly documented by all extensions. If the enabled config value is set to false the extension will not be started. For example, to disable the Spotify extension, add the following to your mopidy.conf:

[spotify]
enabled = false

Advanced configurations

Custom audio sink

If you have successfully installed GStreamer, and then run the gst-inspect or gst-inspect-0.10 command, you should see a long listing of installed plugins, ending in a summary line:

$ gst-inspect-0.10
... long list of installed plugins ...
Total count: 254 plugins (1 blacklist entry not shown), 1156 features

Next, you should be able to produce a audible tone by running:

gst-launch-0.10 audiotestsrc ! audioresample ! autoaudiosink

If you cannot hear any sound when running this command, you won’t hear any sound from Mopidy either, as Mopidy by default uses GStreamer’s autoaudiosink to play audio. Thus, make this work before you file a bug against Mopidy.

If you for some reason want to use some other GStreamer audio sink than autoaudiosink, you can set the audio/output config value to a partial GStreamer pipeline description describing the GStreamer sink you want to use.

Example mopidy.conf for using OSS4:

[audio]
output = oss4sink

Again, this is the equivalent of the following gst-inspect command, so make this work first:

gst-launch-0.10 audiotestsrc ! audioresample ! oss4sink

Streaming through SHOUTcast/Icecast

Warning

Known issue

Currently, Mopidy does not handle end-of-track vs end-of-stream signalling in GStreamer correctly. This causes the SHOUTcast stream to be disconnected at the end of each track, rendering it quite useless. For further details, see #492. You can also try the workaround mentioned below.

If you want to play the audio on another computer than the one running Mopidy, you can stream the audio from Mopidy through an SHOUTcast or Icecast audio streaming server. Multiple media players can then be connected to the streaming server simultaneously. To use the SHOUTcast output, do the following:

1. Install, configure and start the Icecast server. It can be found in the icecast2 package in Debian/Ubuntu.

2. Set the audio/output config value to lame ! shout2send. An Ogg Vorbis encoder could be used instead of the lame MP3 encoder.

3. You might also need to change the shout2send default settings, run gst-inspect-0.10 shout2send to see the available settings. Most likely you want to change ip, username, password, and mount. For example:

   [audio]
   output = lame ! shout2send username="alice" password="secret" mount="mopidy"
   

Other advanced setups are also possible for outputs. Basically, anything you can use with the gst-launch-0.10 command can be plugged into audio/output.

Workaround for end-of-track issues - fallback streams

By using a fallback stream playing silence, you can somewhat mitigate the signalling issues.

Example Icecast configuration:

<mount>
  <mount-name>/mopidy</mount-name>
  <fallback-mount>/silence.mp3</fallback-mount>
  <fallback-override>1</fallback-override>
</mount>

The silence.mp3 file needs to be placed in the directory defined by <webroot>...</webroot>.

New configuration values

Mopidy’s config validator will stop you from defining any config values in your config file that Mopidy doesn’t know about. This may sound obnoxious, but it helps us detect typos in your config, and deprecated config values that should be removed or updated.

If you’re extending Mopidy, and want to use Mopidy’s configuration system, you can add new sections to the config without triggering the config validator. We recommend that you choose a good and unique name for the config section so that multiple extensions to Mopidy can be used at the same time without any danger of naming collisions.