(Look, the last songs I listened to before starting this post were all by Midnight Oil and I couldn’t resist mangling the first line of “Pictures” for no good reason whatsoever. Deal with it.)

If you’ve known me for a decent number of years, you know I can’t resist making a “living room multimedia” setup. The most recent rig is an Intel NUC that I planned to run Kodi on, since it does a decent enough job at reading ratings & other tags from my music library files. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t do is offer much in the way of remote controls anymore. The product’s always been more focused on watching videos than listening to music anyway, so I suppose it was inevitable that I’d eventually tire of its shenanigans.

So today I tried switching to Mopidy. Basically, it’s a service-level process which provides access to your music library and will play whatever you select through the local machine’s audio hardware. Perfect!

Only. Well. Not actually perfect.

For starters, Mopidy and Pulseaudio had to be made to talk to one another. (I goofed the first time I tried to follow the instructions to make this work, because of course I did.) And I needed a front-end. (I’ve gone through several, none of them particularly great.) And then I ran into the biggest, most annoying problem: Mopidy and its available front-ends don’t care about tags (other than artist, title, album, and maybe artwork).

I need the ratings, and I also need the Mood tag. Oh, and I want to be able to make smart playlists. That, at least, Kodi could do!

I’m afraid I’m going back to the drawing board. Again.