musica

Simple cloud music Library / music Player

DEMO HERE

Overview

musica is a simple cloud-compatible music library and player.

• Stateless express.js server to handle metadata and (tbd) social listening functionality.

• Media storage and delivery delegated to an S3 (or S3-like) CDN.

• Media upload and application management implemented in a separate command-line tool.

• Front-end built using React, Material-UI, Redux, Howler.

Future Improvements

The basic music player functionality is in place, but needs further work to reach parity with other players.

Backend

The backend could be improved in several areas:

• Using the 'notification' feature in S3/Minio to capture any changes to the stored audio files or metadata.
  (eg updating the index incrementally for each new or changed file)
• Choosing a different location for metadata, to better support user interaction like searching.
• Caching the index rather than fetching it anew for each request.
• Including the upload/management features in the same API, rather than with a separate tool.
• More tests.

Frontend

Missing features:

• Session support - keep the current track (and position) open across reloads
• Shuffle feature
• Search / filtering feature
• Sort by columns
• Seek within a song
• Volume control
• VU meter or visualisation
• Playlists, different track views
• Support for thumbnails
• Automatically reload if new songs are added to the backend
• More tests!

Installation

1. Downloading

git clone https://github.com/MrTrick/musica.git
cd musica
npm install

2. Configuration

musica uses environment variables for configuration, particularly for connecting to the S3 storage.
At minimum, you need to set the following storage server configuration: (with the appropriate values for your setup)

MUSICA_STORAGE_SERVER=localhost
MUSICA_STORAGE_PORT=9000
MUSICA_ACCESS_KEY=SOMETHINGSOMETHINGEXAMPLE
MUSICA_SECRET_KEY=SOMETHINGSOMETHIGNSOMETHINGSECRETEXAMPLE
MUSICA_BUCKET_NAME=musica

These values could alternatively be written in an .env file within the top-level musica/ directory.

You can configure musica to use AWS S3, or run your own storage server. See the Minio section further ahead.

3. Backend

musica's default configuration requires an AWS S3-compatible storage server. This can be AWS S3, or there are other options available:

3a. Minio

Minio is an S3-compatible object storage server. It can be built and run using Docker:

docker pull minio/minio
docker run -p 9000:9000 --name minio1 -e "MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=SOMETHINGSOMETHINGEXAMPLE" -e "MINIO_SECRET_KEY=SOMETHINGSOMETHIGNSOMETHINGSECRETEXAMPLE" minio/minio server /data

Ensure that the details passed to the Docker instance match those configured in your musica environmental variables.

(For more information see https://docs.minio.io/ )

3b. File System

As a fallback, the app can store media and metadata in a filesystem.
Set the server configuration as:

MUSICA_STORAGE_TYPE=fs
MUSICA_STORAGE_PATH=/var/media
MUSICA_STORAGE_MEDIALOCATION=https://cdn.example.com/media

• MUSICA_STORAGE_PATH is the filesystem location where media and metadata will be stored.
• MUSICA_STORAGE_MEDIALOCATION is the URL where the media and metadata can be reached. (Separately from the server process - should run in a static server like npx http-server or Nginx.)

4. Initialising

The musica bucket needs to be created and the access policies set to allow public read access.
This can be done automatically with:

node musica init

5. Add Music

Audio files can be uploaded into musica using the command-line tool:

node musica insert file1.mp3 file2.aac file3.ogg file4.opus...

(Any format supported by both ffmpeg and the npm 'music-metadata' package can be used)

6. Run

npm start

The integrated react.js client will auto-launch in your browser.