ANN Sledge (We're lost in music)#

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 07:16:18 +0000

As a person with a large ripped CD collection at home
I want to find and listen to that music from work/on my phone
So that I don't have to talk to the people around me

Sledge is a program that you can run on a computer with

• some music you want to listen to
• a JVM
• some means of exposing a TCP server port to the internet
• libav / ffmpeg

It indexes all the music in the directories you tell it to look in, and then it serves a web page with a search box and some buttons on it, which you can access on a device (computer/phone/tablet/etc) that

• can access the internet
• has a web browser that supports the HTML5 AUDIO element and likes Ogg files (most of them, these days)

It's also the first useful[*] thing I've written using Clojure and Clojurescript and Om . Get it at https://github.com/telent/sledge - no jar file download yet, so you'll need leiningen to build it

[*] defined as: I'm using it.

Standing on the shoulders of github

The heavy lifting was mostly done by others. In addition to the above-mentioned, it uses

• https://github.com/weavejester/clucy as a Lucene interface
• https://github.com/ztellman/aleph for streaming the transcoded audio
• https://github.com/DanPallas/green-tags to wrap JAudioTagger

Future plans

It's reached MVP, as far as I'm concerned: aside from a couple of bugs it meets my use case. But I do have more planned for it as time permits:

• UI makeover, make it easier to discover music I'd forgotten I have
• Make the initial media scan much much faster (currently does about 2000 files a minute on my machine) and/or show the progress as it scans
• some tools for reporting on duplicate files
• something to deal with correcting/adding tags to media files that have bad or no metadata
• transcode to formats other than Ogg Vorbis, maybe, if there are people who wnt to use it with browsers that don't support Ogg

A long long time ago

Previously: "I started looking at all the UPNP/DLNA stuff once for a “copious spare time” project, but I couldn’t help thinking that for most common uses it was surely way over-engineered". In the four years (and two days) since my opinions haven't changed but my tools have.