musicdb

custom music player running on my personal SBC which can be controlled from other WiFi devices (phone/pc)

should perform pretty well (it runs well on my Pine A64 with 10k+ songs)

why???

server/client

allows you to play music on any device you want while controlling playback from anywhere. you can either run the client and server on the same machine or connect via tcp.

if one client makes a change, all other clients will be notified of it and update almost instantly.

it is also possible for a fake "client" to mirror the main server's playback, so you could sync up your entire house if you wanted to.

complicated queue

• allows more customization of playback (loops, custom shuffles, etc.)
• is more organized (adding an album doesn't add 10-20 songs, it creates a folder so you can (re)move the entire album in/from the queue)

caching of songs

for (almost) gapless playback, even when the data is stored on a NAS or cloud

central database

when storing data on a cloud, it would take forever to load all songs and scan them for metadata. you would also run into issues with different file formats and where to store the cover images. a custom database speeds up server startup and allows for more features.

usage

build

build musicdb-server and musicdb-client using cargo.

Note: the client has a config file in ~/.config/musicdb-client/, which includes the path to a font. You need to set this manually or the client won't start.

setup

prep

You need some directory where your music is located (mp3 files). I will assume this is /music for simplicity.

You will also need a file that will hold your database. I will assume this is dbfile.

Note: Instead of adding the executables (musicdb-client and musicdb-server) to your $PATH, you can run cargo run --release -- followed by the arguments. Since this is using cargo, you need to be in the source directorie for whatever you want to run.

database

musicdb-filldb will read all files in the /music directory and all of its subdirectories, read their metadata and try to figure out as much about these songs as possible. It will then generate a dbfile which musicdb-server can read. You can make changes to the database later, but this should be the easiest way to get started:

musicdb-filldb /music

starting the server

run:

musicdb-server dbfile --tcp 127.0.0.1:26314 --web 127.0.0.1:8080

And that's it - the rest should just work.

You can now open 127.0.0.1:8080 in a browser or use musicdb-client:

musicdb-client gui 127.0.0.1:26314

syncplayer

If /music is the same on two devices, one can act as the server and the other as a client that simply mirrors the server using the client's syncplayer mode:

musicdb-client syncplayer 127.0.0.1:26314