As you may or may not be aware, I use MPD as my desktop audio player (for mobile solutions such as my laptop, I use Rhythmbox or VLC). Futhermore, I use Sonata as a graphical interface for MPD — managing playlists, controlling playback, album art, etc.

However, sometimes I find it more expedient to run a simple command like mpc play instead of switching to a mouse. In order for the mpc command to work properly with MPD, it requires the MPD_HOST and MPD_PORT environment variables to be set. If Sonata notices that these values are set, it uses them by default for configuration, making it impossible to control any other instance of MPD, or — if the environment variables are incorrectly set — from even controlling my default instance.

As it turns out, Sonata allows for some basic command line arguments, in much the same way mpc does. This means I can instead use something like sonata play to start my music playing. Now if only I could update the database that way…