Friday, October 24, 2008

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:

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:
Cheers,
:-Dustin

9 comments:

  1. If you post that as a wishlist bug in Launchpad, I'll add it to the next release.

    :-Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have added:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/musica/+bug/288839

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm not sure if this is a request that would be part of the project or part of the package.

    Could the package support other web servers? Some of the lighter ones maybe like Cherokee (my new favorite) or lighttpd?

    ReplyDelete
  4. If you're willing to test it with other webservers, and provide me with any required configuration changes or instructions, I'll see about modifying the packaging.

    :-Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  5. Good Work!! Works like a charm :-) Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Could you say a little more about why you're doing this, and describe what you hope to accomplish that isn't provided by other packages, like firefly/mt-daapd?

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  7. As requested in the comments above, musica now supports ogg, flac, and wav.

    Cheers,
    :-Dustin

    ReplyDelete

Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin