unicorn-play

A collaborative listening web application. Allow everyone connected to your Local Area Network to add music to the playlist using a web browser.

Dependencies

unicorn-play requires the following external dependencies:

1. A working installation of the Music Player Daemon (mpd).
2. Maven (mvn), a java build tool.

Bare-bones configuration files for MPD are included in this repository. It is recommended that you install a simple MPD client (such as mpc) to test whether MPD’s audio output is working before installing the system.

MPD Setup

The provided mpd configuration files assume several files exist and are available for mpd to write. For example, for on linux, the directory ~/.config/mpd/playlists/ must exist. On the same platform the following will create the requisite files:

mkdir -p ~/.config/mpd/playlists
touch ~/.config/mpd/database ~/.config/mpd/pid ~/.config/mpd/log

With these files in place you should be able to start the daemon using

mpd lin-mpd.conf

Installation

Using git from the command line:

git clone https://github.com/matthugs/unicorn-play.git
cd unicorn-play
mpd lin-mpd.conf # change according to your platform: win-mpd.conf or osx-mpd.conf
cd collab-webapp
mvn jetty:run-war

This last command starts the server running on port 8080. If you’d like to use a different port, you can use a command-line flag:

mvn -Djetty.port=9007 jetty:run-war

Using

Once both mpd and the server are running on your machine, you’ll be able to visit the application by visiting http://localhost:8080/collab-webapp in a web browser (such as Google Chrome). You will also be able to access the interface from any other machine on your Local Area Network, using your IP address in place of localhost.

Library Setup

The default location where mpd looks for music files is ~/Music. This can be changed by the following line in your platform’s mpd.conf file:

music_directory		"~/Music"

Change the path in parentheses to the root directory of wherever you store music files.