Raspberry Pi as an audio web server, not player

[step1041]

Hey everyone,

I'm looking to see if there is a project or software out there for the Raspberry Pi that would have it act as a media server / web server for my music library. The goal would be to have my own local server that would allow clients to connect via web browser and play music through the clients speakers. Its basically a local Spotify or Google Play Music that doesn't touch the internet and uses my local music library I have on another server.

I have tried http://pimusicbox.com/ which works well, but the music plays through the Raspberry Pi, not through the clients web browser.

The purpose of this project was to consolidate my music to one place and distribute it throughout my local network without accessing the internet (I have a 50GB bandwidth cap *sigh*) or installing local software on the devices.

Anyone have any ideas on how I could achieve this? (I hope my explanation makes sense)

[gkreidl]

https://github.com/henrik242/musicbrowser

[tpylkko]

why not use file sharing (NFS or Samba)? it is easy to setup and the devices on your network connecting can use the content on the server as if they were files on their own hard disk. or do you need the server to do some kind of transcoding? Samba is already installed on most of the mediacentre-OS's.

1. write openelec to a sd card
2. boot it in a pi with media on a usb storage or the sd card
3. go to settings, services and activate the samba share.
4. now you can access the stuff on any computer on your network either by mounting the netdrive on the other computers or accessing with a browser via ip (for download). if you mount the device, you can then use any music player to play the files on the pi.

Or is it that your clients only have browsers?

[gkreidl]

why not use file sharing (NFS or Samba)? it is easy to setup and the devices on your network connecting can use the content on the server as if they were files on their own hard disk. or do you need the server to do some kind of transcoding? Samba is already installed on most of the mediacentre-OS's.

You should read a question before answering it.

[tpylkko]

why do you say that?

[gkreidl]

why do you say that?

Because he was asking for a web based application that can be accessed by a browser.

[tpylkko]

Well, there are also extensions to browsers that play music.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefo ... ic-player/

That's a suggestion, not a command. I also have suggestion for you: try politeness.

[gkreidl]

Well, there are also extensions to browsers that play music.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefo ... ic-player/

That's a suggestion, not a command. I also have suggestion for you: try politeness.

He wasn't asking for that, also. He was asking for a web server application that feeds his music to browsers.

If an answer is wrong, is it impolite to say so?

[tpylkko]

If an answer is wrong, is it impolite to say so?

Well, does it matter? Given how apparent it is that that is not what you did here, now is it? Rather you insinuated that I did not bother to read the post even. Then there also the thing that you're assuming that it is your place to say whether the proposed solution (to his problem) is wrong or not, which, unless you are some kind of sheriff around here, seems "a little" unsatisfactory. But if we disregard these facts then we could perhaps ask whether saying that an answer is wrong could be done politely or not, and whether your attempt at that politeness was of high quality. But, you probably already know that, don't you?

Now, please tell me that - now that you've taken us down this path - you do not now "have an eye on me", on these forums? Because, if you want, I can just leave now and avoid the pain.

[gkreidl]

No, I don't have an eye on you. And just to show you what I mean:

Code: Select all

I'm looking to see if there is a project or software out there for the Raspberry Pi that would have it act as a media server / web server for my music library. The goal would be to have my own local server that would allow clients to connect via web browser and play music through the clients speakers.

from the OP.
And I'll stop that now, as it seems to be a useless discussion.

[step1041]

Thank you for the replies. I actually did find a nodejs project that should suit my needs, and with it being open source I can modify it if it doesn't.

https://github.com/benkaiser/node-music-player

My plan is to go buy a 64GB micro SD card today to store Raspbian and my music collection. Then just let the node app do the rest. Then I may set up something like Open Sync or BitTorrent Sync to then sync the files between my Raspberry Pi and my Windows server for easy library updates and to act as a backup.

[tpylkko]

No, I don't have an eye on you. And just to show you what I mean:

While I see your point, that is that the post mentions browser use and so on, it seems to me that it also was suggesting that the problem to be addressed was fundamentally this:

The purpose of this project was to consolidate my music to one place and distribute it throughout my local network without accessing the internet (I have a 50GB bandwidth cap *sigh*) or installing local software on the devices.

Anyone have any ideas on how I could achieve this? (I hope my explanation makes sense)

Given that any normal computational device you are likely to find at home will with 99.9% probability have 1) a music sofware or atleast 2) a broswer that can install an extension, then it seemed to me that this could be a possible solution to the problem. I realize that this is not necessarily what the OP desires, and that there may be reasons why this is not doable (maybe the devices are some kinds of "thin clients" with nothing expect a browser), but I certainly don't see why this could not be at least suggested without being insulted...

[steve.t.oppenheim]

MINIdlna - may be another option which I have run on my pi.

http://www.panticz.de/Install-MiniDLNA

This allows you to use your PI as a video server as well as an MP3 server. Yet this is a server only, it does not provide the web front end for choosing. For that I would recomend the likes of KODI, XBMC for choosing the files served.

-steve

[stim]

Subsonic would seem to be the perfect choice for this:
http://subsonic.org/

I've been running a subsonic server from an atom cpu for over a year with zero problems. I have mine port-forwarded as I travel a lot and it's very satisfying to have your music on tap.

It can be installed on the Pi - obviously Pi2 is recommended for performance reasons. You should probably avoid transcoding. Otherwise, it does what you need.

[tpylkko]

All of these solutions appear to have their merits, but also their downsides.

Using filesharing and, say, Rhythmbox, the client can make libraries, playlists and scrobble albumart/metadata. But you need to install music software on client.

The solution by gkreidl is quite nice, easy to setup and requires very little resources. However, it lacks many features that some might find important. It doesn't support many common audio formats like flac, and it only plays and displays music folders from the drive, not from a library that can be organized however you want by metadata/tags. It also does not have a mobile-device-friendly version of the UI

The other solution given by the OP does not lack these functions mentioned above. It does play many formats, does provide a database, does offer a mobile version of UI and even can fetch music from the internet. However, it is larger, it's more of a hassle to set up, the library scanning is quite slow and at times it just doesn't function. Other than that it runs on Pi (even A+/B+)

DLNA and Subsonic (there are many forks of this, some with open code) require even more software setup on the client than a simple browser extension (which was already considered too much). If that doesn't matter then they probably offer the most functionality.

[gkreidl]

I have a well organized music collection and don't need a database.
And it's easy to add more file formats,
BTW, I'm using my own Python based media server, but it's similar to music browser.

[tpylkko]

A data-base, though, would allow searching on the basis of meta-data, like say release year, genre, and other such things, allowing you to quickly look at the same collection from many differnet perspectives. You can't possibly organize files on a drive so that this can be done. Also, what if you want to stream (to client) a playlist that is not an album, but some songs from one album and some from another etc.? The only way this could be done on music browser (it seems to me) is by making a new folder with these songs in it. For some people, with certain listening habbits, this is no deal. But for others, this might make the entire application useless.

For adding support for other files, I notice that the php-file has a section where file type "mp3" is specified and the comments state that other types can be added. It however, does not state whether this requires some more adjustment. Elsewhere it calls the flash player "an mp3 player". So, do you mean that it would be easy to have it send other files over, but not play them with the player? I'd like to try to have it play flac.

[gkreidl]

For example
'fileTypes' => array("mp3","m4a","aac", "ac3","flac","ogg")
in index.php (I also added some video formats).

A few years ago I created a special NMT-version (popcornhour and compatible). I added JSP playlist format and local playback in the NMT itself and a lot of audio&video formats.

[tpylkko]

Ok. Thanks for the info!