vortex

A web client to control a Music Player Daemon (mpd) server and to organize music libraries amongst a group of people.

NOTE: This is still in development and is not yet fully functional. I am just exercising some Readme Driven Development.

Description

Audio files are uploaded to a DROPBOX folder, from where their tags are read and used to import them into the music library. The files are moved into the MEDIA folder, which is rigidly organized into a artist/album/track-title hierarchy. This means that untagged files won't be imported and left into the DROPBOX.

A web interface to mpd can be used to control playback, load and create playlists, search the library and download audio files.

Dependencies

• Django (>= 1.5)
• South (for model migrations)
• mutagen (for getting information on audio files)
• django-haystack (for searching the library)
• python-mpd (for interfacing with the mpd server)
• Pillow (or PIL) (for dealing with album cover art)
• dj-database-url (for parsing a $DATABASE_URL environment variable into a proper database setting as required by Django)

These can all be installed using pip with the command pip install -r requirements/base.txt.

Configuration

Configuration options are specified through environment variables and as Python variables in vortex/config.py.

Environment variables

• DATABASE_URL: The URL for the database in a format suitable for dj_database_url (for example, postgres://user@host:5432/vortex)

• VORTEX_MEDIA_ROOT: The path of the directory in which music files are kept. This should be the same as the music_directory option in the configuration file of the mpd server.

• VORTEX_DROPBOX: The path of the directory in which files that are to be imported into the music library are uploaded.

• VORTEX_LOGFILE: The file used for logging. Note that this will probably be removed in the future to log directly to standard output in order for vortex to be more easily run as a managed app.

• VORTEX_SECRET_KEY: the secret key used for security in Django. A string of 50 random characters would do.

• VORTEX_STATIC_ROOT: the root folder on the file system from where static files will be served.

• MPD_HOST, MPD_PORT, MPD_PASSWORD: MPD configuration.

Other settings

The other settings are described in vortex/config.py. You might want to change the Haystack search engine to a proper one, like Solr or ElasticSearch.

About

This is built by Rafik Draoui and it is my first non-trivial personal project. It was made for real-life usage in my household, but primarily for providing an excuse to learn Django, i18n and whatever else would come up in such a multi-faceted project.