I Want My Music Library in the Cloud.

[adwilk]

I've been searching a lot on this lately and haven't come up with a great solution.

I've uploaded a lot of my music via FTP to my hosted server space. Its taken some time, but I've just built web pages for the music I've wanted to listen to with html5 audio tags so they can be played on my phone, office computer, etc. Problem is, there isn't much flexibility- playlists, loop, repeat, etc. It also takes too much time to duplicate and update each individual page for every album. There has to be a better way.

I want to have a light interface to browse and play all my music saved on my server via the web. This seems easy enough but I haven't found anything satisfactory yet.

Any ideas? I don't want to post a public link to what I'm using now, but can PM a link to those willing to help.

Much appreciated...

 

[Ken g6]

Its taken some time, but I've just built web pages for the music I've wanted to listen to with html5 audio tags so they can be played on my phone, office computer, etc. Problem is, there isn't much flexibility- playlists, loop, repeat, etc. It also takes too much time to duplicate and update each individual page for every album. There has to be a better way.

Sounds like you need some server-side code, preferably with embedded HTML, to generate these pages for you. PHP and JSP will do this for sure; I expect ASP will too. The first question is, what server-side languages, if any, does your hosting support?

As for flexibility...I really don't know enough about HTML5 audio to know what to suggest.

Any ideas? I don't want to post a public link to what I'm using now, but can PM a link to those willing to help.

I would say the legality of doing either is...questionable at best. But I Am Not A Lawyer.

 

[ejjpi]

Why not just using services like spotify or google music?

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1229970?hl=en

 

[crashtestdummy]

I'd say you have three options. In order from least complicated (and least flexible) to most:

Google Music/Spotify/XBox Music or equivalent. These will scan your music directory, and make available cloud copies of most of it. For some more obscure stuff, you may not be able to upload it. (It's likely that your Georgian folk music collection won't be available, for example.) You also won't be able to download the music files in the form that are on your computer now. The advantage, though, is that the music will follow you everywhere and be easily available.

The second is something like the WD MyCloud. The app will be able to stream music off of the device. This is probably your best bet, if you don't mind purchasing the hardware. You can access the media either through apps or their website. You're going to hit a lot of the same problems with lack of playlist support, though.

The third option is to set up a DLNA server on a static IP. This is a completely custom option, and has the advantage that you're able to access the files any way you want. As mentioned above, though, you're going to have to build a website in order to stream through a browser.

 

[smackababy]

Sounds like you need some server-side code, preferably with embedded HTML, to generate these pages for you. PHP and JSP will do this for sure; I expect ASP will too. The first question is, what server-side languages, if any, does your hosting support?

As for flexibility...I really don't know enough about HTML5 audio to know what to suggest.

I would say the legality of doing either is...questionable at best. But I Am Not A Lawyer.

Not even remotely questionable if this is legal or not. If he is hosting a service that allows others to listen to his music, it is illegal. If he is the only person with access, I would say he is in the clear.

Coding a generic page and an interface to allow you to browse your library shouldn't be too difficult.

 

[adwilk]

You guys are awesome. Thanks for the informative replies. I didn't think about the legality issues because its going to be used by me and members of our household, but I can see why that would be an issue.

I've been coding pages for each album with direct links to the tracks. I was just hoping for a faster way to do it than manually typing in each track name on every single page. I figure there is a way to automatically index each folder, but I don't know how to do that.

Perhaps the custom option is above my pay grade and I certainly don't want any legal issues from what I thought was a harmless project. I do see the fallacies though.

I had a couple recommendations for PLEX media server and I think I'm going to go that route for now.

I've also set up googleplay and really like some of the features, don't like others. I'll probably use it for custom playlists and whatnot though. Appreciate that suggestion.

I'm interested in the last comment- "Coding a generic page and an interface to allow you to browse your library shouldn't be too difficult". Elaborate? Its not difficult it just takes so much time. Can I modify htaccess to allow indexing of those pages? How?

 

[DaveSimmons]

You're creating a music-oriented Content Management System.

With PHP + MySQL you'd switch from static pages with hard-coded data to script pages that plug datra into them on-the-fly.

MySQL
You store song information and file names into a MySQL database.

PHP
- Script page to add new records to the MySQL database
- Script pages for pulling information from the MySQL database to serve up songs


... or try Amazon's cloud player. It does the scan-your-songs part for shared storage but still also lets you upload music that isn't in their library.

 

[adwilk]

You're creating a music-oriented Content Management System.

With PHP + MySQL you'd switch from static pages with hard-coded data to script pages that plug datra into them on-the-fly.

MySQL
You store song information and file names into a MySQL database.

PHP
- Script page to add new records to the MySQL database
- Script pages for pulling information from the MySQL database to serve up songs

Yep- exactly what I need. I was hoping that management system was already out there ready to install on my server. :redface:

I don't know how to do that stuff unfortunately. I can use content management systems and know basic tags / CSS etc, but building out the backend is beyond my know how. Who knows, maybe its time to learn?? Installing MySQL now. Here we go.

 

[smackababy]

It shouldn't be extremely hard to input the song info into a simple MySQL database. Artist, title, genre, possibly a song ID number that is unique, storage path.

Your generic page could easily be a page that only has the most basic of player information required and you can have some sort of selector that you can query by artist, genre, song, whatever. When you select a song, it could just feed it into the player portion.

 

[Markbnj]

It shouldn't be extremely hard to input the song info into a simple MySQL database. Artist, title, genre, possibly a song ID number that is unique, storage path.

Your generic page could easily be a page that only has the most basic of player information required and you can have some sort of selector that you can query by artist, genre, song, whatever. When you select a song, it could just feed it into the player portion.

I might even just format them into json or xml and stuff them into Elastic Search.

 

[adwilk]

It shouldn't be extremely hard to input the song info into a simple MySQL database. Artist, title, genre, possibly a song ID number that is unique, storage path.

Your generic page could easily be a page that only has the most basic of player information required and you can have some sort of selector that you can query by artist, genre, song, whatever. When you select a song, it could just feed it into the player portion.

I agree that it shouldn't be extremely hard- I can set up the database with the fields I want. Its getting the thousands of songs' info into said database. I THINK I can manage to build the generic page to search and load requested data once its entered. I THINK.

Thanks for the input again, everyone.

 

[adwilk]

I might even just format them into json or xml and stuff them into Elastic Search.

There that goes- wheeewww right over my head. Haha. *googling now.

 

[Crusty]

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/

It's not pretty, but it's functional.

 

[Kilrsat]

http://www.turnstyle.com/andromeda/home.asp

Another prebuilt option.

 

[Leros]

I might even just format them into json or xml and stuff them into Elastic Search.

This is kinda dumb, but would be easier for the OP to implement and would work fine with only a few users.

Organize your music into a nice directory structure.
/music/<artist>/<album>/<track>-<title>.ext
ex. /music/SomeBand/SomeAlbum/02-SomeSong.mp3

Instead of using a database or a search index (those would be the "right" solution), you could just read directly from the file system every time you generate a page.

Want to list all artists? Scan the /music directory for subdirectories. You could generate links like site.com/player?artist=SomeBand. Going there scans the /music/SomeBand directory for albums. Repeat the concept for albums.

To re-iterate. Not the correct solution. Won't scale to lots of users. Will work for the OP to a certain point depending on how large his music collection is and it won't require any management to get his music into a database or search index.

 

[SaurusX]

Why not use a program like Subsonic? It sounds like you're trying to reinvent the wheel.

 

[smackababy]

Why not use a program like Subsonic? It sounds like you're trying to reinvent the wheel.

Reinventing the wheel isn't always a bad thing. I write programs that have functionality I could easily go find, but in doing it, I generally learn something in the process.

I suppose, I'm weird though. I enjoy software development. >_>