# Clients

Once Mopidy is up and running, you need a client to control it.

Note that clients only control Mopidy. The audio itself is not streamed to the clients, but it is played on the computer running Mopidy. This is by design, as Mopidy was originally modelled after MPD. If you want to stream audio from Mopidy to another device, the primary options are Icecast and Snapcast.

The most popular ways to control Mopidy are with web clients and with MPD clients.

In addition, alternative frontends like Mopidy-MPRIS and Mopidy-Raspberry-GPIO provides additional ways to control Mopidy. Alternative frontends that use a server-client architecture usually list relevant clients in the extension’s documentation.

## Web clients

There are many clients available that use Mopidy-HTTP to control Mopidy.

### Web extensions

Mopidy extensions can make additional web APIs available through Mopidy’s builtin web server by implementing the HTTP server side API. Web clients can use the HTTP JSON-RPC API to control Mopidy from JavaScript.

See the Mopidy extension registry to find a number of web clients can be easily installed as Mopidy extensions.

### Non-extension web clients

There are a few Mopidy web clients that are not installable as Mopidy extensions:

- Apollo Player

- Mopster

### Web-based MPD clients

There are several web based MPD clients, which doesn’t use the Mopidy-HTTP frontend at all, but connect to Mopidy through the Mopidy-MPD frontend. For a list of those, see the “Web clients” section of the MPD wiki’s clients list.

### Standalone applications

Lastly, there are Mopidy clients implemented as standalone applications:

- Argos

## MPD clients

MPD is the protocol used by the original MPD server project since 2003. The Mopidy-MPD extension provides a server that implements the same protocol, and is compatible with most MPD clients.

There are dozens of MPD clients available. Please refer to the Mopidy-MPD extension’s documentation for an overview.

## MPRIS clients

MPRIS is a specification that describes a standard D-Bus interface for making media players available to other applications on the same system.

See the Mopidy-MPRIS documentation for a survey of some MPRIS clients.