Announcing 'musica' for Ubuntu Intrepid

I am proud to announce a new package in Ubuntu Universe: musica.

musica is a web application written in PHP for browsing and streaming your mp3's over HTTP. There are, of course, plenty of alternatives out there--this is my implementation of the rather common idea ;-)

Here's a screen shot:


What I like about musica is that it's basically one self-contained index.php file and it does not use a database to archive and manage your music. It reads everything it needs directly from the file system.

This does, of course, mean that you have to follow a relatively rigid naming scheme in organizing your music. Basically, a music/ directory contains a bunch of artist directories. Each artist directory contains either miscellaneous songs, or one or more album directories. Each album directory contains the songs on that album. That's how my music is organized.

If you organize your music similarly, you can simply (on an Ubuntu Intrepid system):

$ sudo apt-get install musica
$ sudo ln -s /path/to/your/music /usr/share/musica/music

And then point your browser to http://localhost/musica.

I have a package for Hardy in my PPA:

• https://launchpad.net/~kirkland/+archive
  

Some features include:

• Dynamic m3u construction for streaming with your favorite music playing application
  
• Dynamic archive construction for downloading a whole album (as a .tar)
  
• Dynamic URL's cross-linking to Wikipedia for artist, album, song documentation and cover art
• Basic search capability for artists/albums/songs
• A "Random" artist link for those times when you're not quite sure what you want to listen to

Please file bugs, questions, and feature requests in Launchpad under:

• https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/musica
  

Cheers,
:-Dustin