snowgloo

Snowman's Igloo

A cool place to chill and listen to music.

First time setup

Setup nvm. Use latest node stable.

In project root, run

npm install
cd web-server
npm install
cd ..
cd web-client
npm install
cd ..

Create a file called variables.sh. It will need at minimum.

#! /bin/bash

export SNOWGLOO_MEDIA_ROOT="/<absolute-path-to-repo>/.web-media"

export SNOWGLOO_DATABASE_DIR="./docker-volume/db/snowgloo"

export SNOWGLOO_WEB_API_URL='"http://localhost:5051/api/"'

export SNOWGLOO_MEDIA_SERVER_URL='http://localhost:5050'

Make a directory in the repo root called .web-media. All music for development goes in this folder.

Developing

Adjust the parameters of script/docker/test.sh to match your environment. Run it. Then run script/app/develop.sh to restart the app from scratch.

A temporary directory will be created in the project root at .docker-volume. Some scripts can delete this from time to time.

Why build another music player?

I wanted a media app that did two things.

1. Rely on a file system of organized music instead of a database
2. Android support from the ground up

There are a lot of open source options for playing music. Of the dozens I tried, Ampache and Airsonic were the closest in usability to what I wanted. They are supported by a large community, and that shows in their user experience. They are clunky and try to do a little bit of everything to please a large user base.

Snowgloo is tailored exactly how I want music to work. Media is already in a format that is easy to stream. Folders and files contain enough information to build a catalog. The clients are first and foremost consumers of media. If changes are needed to the catalog, then you tweak the file-system.

Android support was another motivator. Although there are a number of open source clients for the servers mentioned above, they all lack basic features like searching the library.

How does it work?

It currently only works for me. There is a hard-configured list of servers to talk with and users to allow. If this project seems like it could be useful to you, then I am open to making the few changes necessary to make it server and user agnostic.

What won't it do?

1. Snowgloo will never have metadata management.
   1. I was annoyed when other solutions started pinging third party services to do things like collect album art. I already have a curated collection, that sort of feature is wasted on my library.
2. Play anything other than music
   1. There are way better tools for handling other media. For video, Jellyfin is the way to go. Their ultra high definition and anime playback is lacking, but that's where Snowby comes in.