Peer to peer distibuted music player.

Uses Apache Solr to create a searchable index of music files across any number of computers. Combined with a lightweight file server on each indexed machine and a web client, you can play your music --- regardless of where it is --- from any computer.

Created out of exasperation at not remembering which music was on my desktop, laptop, at home, at work, etc..

Author: Thomas Getgood (thomas.getgood@gmail.com)

Last edit: Thursday, 21 June 2012

The player consists of a search server, a music server, and a web client that can either be run locally, or served up via the client server.

The music server is responsible for serving up requested music files. It is also responsible for maintaining the index of music available on the host machine and updating the Solr server when this changes.

Automatic indexing is currently not working, so the index must be built manually. See server/music/scripts/build_index.py for usage instructions. Tested on Ubuntu 10.04, and 11.10, but should be compatible with any Unix-like operating system provided the dependencies are available.

The intention is to add an authentication layer so that your music is not open to the world --- unless you want it to be --- but this is not implemented yet, so be warned that by running this continuously without some sort of reverse proxy of your own, all sorts of evil things might happen to you.

The Solr server is a standard Solr deployment using the schema and configuration files shipped with this repo. I deploy Solr on Tomcat, but that's not terribly important. For the time being you'll have to convert the config files appropriately if you choose a different serverlet container. See the installation section for instructions on deploying Solr.

Bare bones client to search and play music. Still needs lots of work. The core components are jPlayer to play the music and the AJAX-Solr Javascript library to interact with Solr for search.

jPlayer uses HTML5 audio to play the music and falls back on flash if that fails. HTML5 audio still has it's problems, so the experience will vary.

Progressive enhancement was not a priority in the design since nothing will work without Javascript and I have no intention of changing that.

N.B. Functionality is the primary goal. The client is very simple and will likely stay that way until the underlying structure is working and stable.

Currently requires a fair bit of assembly. These instructions have only been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 and 11.10, but should be adaptable to any Unix-like system. If you do so adapt, feel free to add your own instructions for different systems.

These instructions run Solr 3.5.0 on Tomcat 6. Other versions of Solr may work and other containers definitely should, but are untested.

There are instructions at http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrTomcat, but they're very technical and I'm hoping my instructions are easier.

Install tomcat

$ apt-get install tomcat6

Download and unpack Solr

$ wget http://apache.mirror.iweb.ca/lucene/solr/3.5.0/apache-solr-3.5.0.tgz
$ tar -zxf apache-solr-3.5.0.tgz
$ cp -R apache-solr-3.5.0/example/solr /usr/share
$ cp apache-solr-3.5.0/dist/apache-solr-3.5.0.war /usr/share/solr
$ ln -s /usr/share/solr/apache-solr-3.5.0.war /usr/share/solr/solr.war
$ cp -R apache-solr-3.5.0/contrib /usr/share/solr
$ mkdir /usr/share/solr/lib
$ cp apache-solr-3.5.0/dist/*.jar /usr/share/solr/lib

Run servers/search/solr-config/setup.sh to link the solr configuration in this repo to the correct places.

Set Tomcat to own the solr directory and restart it:

$ chown -R tomcat:tomcat /usr/share/solr
$ /etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart # service tomcat6 restart on ubuntu

Install node

$ apt-get install node

I'm not sure what verison this is currently at, so you may be better off downloading node from github and building it yourself. Requires at least node 0.6.6.

Install npm

$ curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

Install node packages for this project

$ npm install cron
$ npm install mime

Create files at client/clientConfig.js and server/serverConfig.json based on the provided example files. The proxy objects are only important if you enable the proxy in the final step (which you ought to). The hosts should be the IPs of the machines the services are running on and the ports should be left the same unless you know what you're doing with the exception of the music server port which is entirely arbitrary.

Run servers/music/scripts/build_index.py with the parameters requested. If you've left all of the defaults in the config files above and your IP is a.b.c.d then this should look like the following (provided everything is running on one machine.

$ build_index.sh a.b.c.d 31337 a.b.c.d 8080 /path/to/music mp3 ogg flac ...

Tomcat (and hence Solr) are already running from the Solr installation above. In addition run the following:

$ node servers/music/server.js &
$ node servers/search/node-proxies/solrProxyExample.js &
$ node client/server.js & # This is optional, see below

Finally access the client at localhost:8000 if running the third node server or at file://path/semos/client/index.html if not.

Good luck.