PartyJukebox/readme.md
2024-05-27 13:09:00 -04:00

3.6 KiB

Party Jukebox

This project requires VLC to play sound files

Purpose

The Party Jukebox is a program that allows many people to add music, skip songs, play, and pause from any web device to the same device and playlist.
This was created for a personal use case for parties, and is a simple, (mostly) functional solution to have a collective playlist for local mp3 files.
Main strenghts compared to doing something similar using Spotify are that you can limit the songs that can be played to your selection. Songs can be chosen, but only from a list

Basic Setup

Client Setup:

The client is a web application that can be hosted on any server, it need not be the same device running the music player.

  • If the app is being setup for a large group, you can distribute the url (via QR code, for example) with ?ip=YOURSERVERHOSTNAME:19054 set as an attribute after the url.

Server Setup:

Pre-setup: If you want the songs to have art associated with them, it is all hosted on and retrieved from LastFM, and you will need to sign up for a developer app, and put your key in the database generator

The server side consists of 3 files

sound/
databaseGenerator.py
webbyBits.py
  1. Place mp3 files in the sound/ folder
  2. Open databaseGenerator.py and put your LastFM API key in at the top (optional)
  3. Run databaseGenerator.py
    • The databaseGenerator.py will index all mp3 files, and save the information to songDatabase.json
    • If getting images, this process may take a long time with a large amount of mp3 files
  4. Run webbyBits.py

You can now connect with the client and use the app as normal.
Read on for specific information on each piece of the app.

Details

These are specific details on each section of the app, and how to use them

Server:

  • sound/ contains all mp3 files
  • databaseGenerator.py scans through mp3 files and gets information about them
    • Filename, Title, Artist, Art, Length are all saved
      • If the title and artist are not in the mp3 metadata, it looks for a format of TITLE_ARTIST.mp3 and otherwise defaults to the file name as the title, and no artist
      • Art is retrieved from LastFM
    • Running with --mode (update/new) either updates the current database and only adds new songs, or recreates the entire database (update is default)
    • Running with --art (True/False) retrieves art from LastFM or doesn't (True is default)
      • Can only generate one song / 0.25 seconds, to avoid pinging the LastFM server too much
  • songDatabase.json stores all the information about each song in this format:
[
    {
    "file": "The Search_NF.mp3", 
    "title": "The Search", 
    "artist": "NF", 
    "art": "https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/64s/03125956378d531a44e1b7da89aae795.png", 
    "length": 292
    }
]
  • webbyBits.py imports the database, runs all music playing, and accepts all commands from clients
    • Searches return matching songs
    • Accepts Play-Pause and Skip commands

Client:

image
From left to right:

  • The playlist button shows the current queue of songs
  • The play-pause button toggles playing
  • The skip button goes to the next track
  • The search button opens the search screen (pictured)
  • The settings button (top right) opens the settings menu
    • Server IP allows you to change the ip that the site connects to
    • Alert time changes how long error/confirmation messages are shown for (Default 2s)
    • Party Mode adds new songs to the queue when the queue has only 1 song in it
    • Volume controls the vlc volume of the connected server