Remote Amarok music collection?

[Marko Vojinovic]

Hi folks! :-)

I am trying to migrate from XMMS to Amarok, with the hope of improved
functionality and ease of dealing with my music collection.

So I have a very trivial problem: my music collection is now on a http
server. How do I get Amarok to make a collection database out of that,
short of downloading all that to a local disk? The very point of
having all the files on a http server is that I *don't* want to have
them on a local disk. So I want Amarok to create a database of the
files present on the server, from which I can later create playlists.
The music would stay on the server, and Amarok would read the files
over http and play them one by one.

I can do all this trivially with, say, mplayer --- I just need a text
file containing lines of http://www.myserver.com/music.mp3, and it
would play if I do a "mplayer -playlist myplaylist.txt". What I want
is to do the equivalent in Amarok, since I expect to have a better UI
regarding the order of files, shuffle&repeat stuff, etc.

Amarok doesn't appear to have a "load playlist from a txt file" kind of option.

N.B. I've been using Amarok for about 20 minutes total, so please tell
me that I have missed something really obvious. ;-)

:-)
Marko

[Mark Haney]

Hi folks! :-)

I am trying to migrate from XMMS to Amarok, with the hope of improved
functionality and ease of dealing with my music collection.

So I have a very trivial problem: my music collection is now on a http
server. How do I get Amarok to make a collection database out of that,
short of downloading all that to a local disk? The very point of
having all the files on a http server is that I *don't* want to have
them on a local disk. So I want Amarok to create a database of the
files present on the server, from which I can later create playlists.
The music would stay on the server, and Amarok would read the files
over http and play them one by one.

I can do all this trivially with, say, mplayer --- I just need a text
file containing lines of http://www.myserver.com/music.mp3, and it
would play if I do a "mplayer -playlist myplaylist.txt". What I want
is to do the equivalent in Amarok, since I expect to have a better UI
regarding the order of files, shuffle&repeat stuff, etc.

I gotta tell you, if you have it all on an HTTP server, why not use icecast? Or one of the either streaming media servers? I use icecast for mine since I have my MP3 jukebox (with 6TB of Mp3s) sitting in my server room and can stream that to anyone in the house who wants it. There are even customised playlists for the kids and things. Although, IIRC those I setup to pick music in certain folders, that way there was no real configuration issues for me.




Marko
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[Martin Airs]

Post by Marko Vojinovic
Hi folks! :-)
I am trying to migrate from XMMS to Amarok, with the hope of improved
functionality and ease of dealing with my music collection.
So I have a very trivial problem: my music collection is now on a http
server. How do I get Amarok to make a collection database out of that,
short of downloading all that to a local disk? The very point of
having all the files on a http server is that I *don't* want to have
them on a local disk. So I want Amarok to create a database of the
files present on the server, from which I can later create playlists.
The music would stay on the server, and Amarok would read the files
over http and play them one by one.
I can do all this trivially with, say, mplayer --- I just need a text
file containing lines of http://www.myserver.com/music.mp3, and it
would play if I do a "mplayer -playlist myplaylist.txt". What I want
is to do the equivalent in Amarok, since I expect to have a better UI
regarding the order of files, shuffle&repeat stuff, etc.
Amarok doesn't appear to have a "load playlist from a txt file" kind of option.
N.B. I've been using Amarok for about 20 minutes total, so please tell
me that I have missed something really obvious. ;-)
:-)
Marko

Have a look at Ampache (http://ampache.org)

I have mp3's in my OwnCloud, and that uses ampache to serve them to me using
Amarok

I haven't installed ampache as a stand alone thing, but I think with a little
reading of the documentation it shouldn't be too hard, and it'll do what your
after

Amarok supports ampache btw

Hope that helps

Martin
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[Marko Vojinovic]

Post by Martin Airs

Post by Marko Vojinovic
So I have a very trivial problem: my music collection is now on a http
server. How do I get Amarok to make a collection database out of that,
short of downloading all that to a local disk? The very point of
having all the files on a http server is that I *don't* want to have
them on a local disk. So I want Amarok to create a database of the
files present on the server, from which I can later create playlists.
The music would stay on the server, and Amarok would read the files
over http and play them one by one.

Have a look at Ampache (http://ampache.org)

Yes, I have looked at both ampache and icecast (suggested by Mark Haney), and
some other streaming servers.

But the streaming server seems to be an overkill for my purposes. All I want
is to put a "http://www.server.com/somefile.mp3" into the Amarok collection
(local database, remote files), so that I can play it.

A streaming server would require some work in installation/setup on the
server, which I am not willing to do. I would prefer the client-only solution,
if there is one, since I expect it to be much simpler (both conceptually and
in practice).

Thanks for the thoughts, though! :-)

Best, :-)
Marko

[Marko Vojinovic]

Post by Marko Vojinovic
But the streaming server seems to be an overkill for my purposes. All I
want is to put a "http://www.server.com/somefile.mp3" into the Amarok
collection (local database, remote files), so that I can play it.

pure http is wrong for this, amarok works with a filesystem
so mount the remotefs which is transparent for the application
* http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount.davfs
* fuse.sshfs
* curlftpfs

Yes, that's one of the options I began contemplating, since I see that Amarok
always asks for a location of the music somewhere inside /. I'll look into it,
thanks!

I just want to be sure that there is no simpler way, before I go on to mount a
remote filesystem. Also, will a remote filesystem give me trouble in the
situations where I don't have an Internet connection? Will Amarok be able to
cope with occasional (but regular) loss of the mount point?

On a side note, why do you say that pure http is wrong for this? From where
I'm sitting, I see absolutely no reason to make a distinction between local
music and remote music. It looks like an unneeded limitation of Amarok (or
short-sightedness of its devs?) to require music to reside on a filesystem.
Everything is becoming remote and "clouded" these days. :-) I would prefer the
functionality of having a music collection which contains local files, remote
http files, youtube links, .iso images of audio CD's, etc... Somehow I naively
expected that Amarok already has this functionality... ;-)

Best, :-)
Marko

[Marko Vojinovic]

but anyways - how would you imagine amarok work only with http?
amarok is indexing the collection folder
this is not possible with http at all

I don't expect it to be indexed. It would be enough (for me) to have an URL in
the collection database. The remaining data (ID3tag etc.) can be pulled in on
the first playback or similar.

I am not actually sure what kind of indexing is being performed at all (with
local files). Isn't the "collection" just a list of all music files with their
paths (and tags and stuff), written in some database? In this respect, I still
don't see how a file obtained from http is any different from a file obtained
from a local hard disk.

Note, though, that I have remained fairly ignorant about this whole media
player technology since the time of WinAMP and XMMS (cca 1995), so I am not
exactly well informed about how and why the design of Amarok is the way it is.

Best, :-)
Marko

[Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu]

Post by Marko Vojinovic
A streaming server would require some work in installation/setup on the
server, which I am not willing to do. I would prefer the client-only solution,
if there is one, since I expect it to be much simpler (both conceptually and
in practice).

Try out subsonic - it's fantastic. Dead easy to setup, and there are
clients available for many, many different platforms. You can even just
use the web interface to listen to your music.

Bonus: it also lets you stream your videos!

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

I have it running on an OpenMediaVault server (I have OMV virtualized
via KVM). OpenMediaVault is probably the best Linux based NAS distro out
there.

Regards,

Ranbir