PlayMusic Readme

Introduction

PlayMusic is a pair of java programs designed to allow one music server to be controlled by one or more clients. These clients can either run a java GUI program or use a telnet text based interface.

Because this is all written in Java, it is compatible with Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.

The server is PlayMusicD, the client is PlayGui.

Installation

To install the client, put the files in the client directory somewhere useful. Move playgui.conf to /etc/ or pass the location in on the command line (java PlayGui ~/.playgui).

To install the server, put the files in the server directory where you would like them to be run from. Move the file playmusicd.conf to /etc/ or pass the location in on the command line (java PlayMusicD ~/.playmusicd.conf). Initscripts for Gentoo linux are included in the server/init directory.

Configuration

Edit playmusicd.conf for the server and playgui.conf for the client, and read the comments in those files.

Excecution

Run the server as java PlayMusicD, or use the included initscripts. Once the server is running, run java PlayGui or telnet into the server on port 10332 (unless you changed it). The GUI should be intuitive; the telnet version is not so.

With telnet, if you want to use it, get an idea of the commands by entering ListCommands.

Tags

Tags allow a feature similar to both playlists but much more customizeable by allowing you to tag a song with some tag. You can tag as many songs with a given tag as you want. Some example tags might be live, rock, happy, or birthdaymix. To retrieve the songs tagged by some tag, do a search (see below) for "t:tagname".

Search

You can run a search entering it in the search box in the upper right. The search can be as simple as "beatles", but searches also allow both booleans and tags. To do a boolean search, use the C-style "&&" for "and", and "||" for "or". Parens are allowed for grouping, as are exclamation points preceeding terms (or groups) for exclusions. So a search of "(beatles || acdc) && !t:live" would give you all songs containg the words "acdc" or "beatles" but excluding all live ones (or at least the ones you've tagged as live).

Searches are case insensitive.

Liscensing

Copyright (C) 2005 Jeff Kaufman

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. Alternatively, the GPL is available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html .


Last modified: Tue Aug 30 16:45:05 EST 2005