Show HN: Ampache – Self-hosted personal music and video streaming server | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ampache – Self-hosted personal music and video streaming server

ampache.org

58 pointsArtemic24 comments

I live Ampache - but I've still not found a good mobile / Android client for it.

The core server is great at cataloguing my music and streaming it to the browser, but I'm struggling on mobile playback. Any one found a good player?

Have you tried dSub? It's a subsonic client but it works when you enable the subsonic api in Ampache.
Tomahawk is an interesting one, but is missing a little for me.
Honestly, I use foldersync to just d/l newly added music from my server on a routine basis and rely on dSub for when I've added something that hasn't synced.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=github.daneren...

Why doesn't vlc work?

I love Ampache. While the web interface is not that great, it really shines with its multitude of backends: Subsonic, Plex, DAAP, UPnP/DLNA, and also WebDAV access. I'm mostly accessing Ampache via the Subsonic and UPnP backends, and it works really great. There are excellent mobile clients which work pretty much out of the box with it (DSub, BubbleUPnP).

Changelog - https://github.com/ampache/ampache/blob/master/docs/CHANGELO...

This is a pretty great streaming solution but last time I used it didn't deal with as many codecs as Kodi

That's right but I believe both Ampache and Kodi are complementary (I'm using both, Ampache on a web server and Kodi at home) and have a quite different approach.

I think the last version I used was 3.5.4, it looks like a lot changed since then. I'm glad to see MusicBrainz support got added. Ampache was definitely a nice way to organize and stream stuff.

Very nice. Alas, I wrote my own ghetto version of this in, gosh, 2005 and have slowly improved and changed it over the following decade into something rather bespoke and custom to my needs and thus will never get non-trivial contributions from others.

2005 eh? Well, ampache is so old, it has a freshmeat entry! ;-) http://freshmeat.net/projects/ampache

Yeah, even 15 years old now if you take a look at Internet archives. That's a long lifetime for a web-based app!

A C++ / Witty alternative: https://github.com/epoupon/lms

is this compatible to with any of the mainstream tv systems such as amazon fire tv, apple tv etc? if not what are some good alternatives?

No client for Android TV as far as I can tell

I still don't feel like I have a complete solution for this. You can use Plex or any subsonic client with Ampache as the backend but it doesn't seem perfect, or near-perfect, to me.

Where am I supposed to store all the music? S3?

I'm storing it on a personal server. S3 would be theoretically fine if you mount it as a file system but I'm not sure this would be the cheaper plan.

S3 or other static hosts can certainly be the cheapest thing if used efficiently, cheapness is one of the main reasons people use them at all! So it should be mounted, I guess that's the easiest way of enumerating tracks and getting metadata (edit: and all the file manager features, duh). But would the traffic also have to go though Ampache? Like this:

      S3 (music files) -> Ampache server -> client

Because it would be a lot more efficient to have the option of specifying that files should be streamed directly from another host like this:

      S3 (music files) --->(streaming)>--------\
       |                                        \
  (read metadata, manage files)                  `-> client
       |                                         /
       |                                        /
     Ampache server -->(web interface etc.)>---/

I now realize it might be kind of a PITA to implement this because of Ampache's extensive feature set. Still, it would be really cool and an efficient way from a pricing as well as speed point of view. Of course, having a fixed IP and a server in your basement is a also decent solution when it's available to you. (hah, definitely not available to me right now)

saw this and immediately upvoted b/c i really want something a lot like this.

went to github and realized i won't use it b/c it's implemented in PHP, i probably don't want exactly what this is, and i don't want to edit/debug PHP (not on my own time, anyway).

is that myopic? anyway, that was my honest, off-the-cuff response to the post.

Do you refuse to use any website written in PHP? How do you manage to have a normal internet life in the year 2015?

There's plenty of websites that don't run on PHP though? StackOverflow runs on ASP .NET, Twitter ran on Rails at one point, now it's partially a mix of things but some of it is in Scala I suppose, plenty of major sites don't run off of PHP. PHP isn't impossible to use or anything, but it's not the only solution. Everyone should use whatever they're comfortable using. Edit: So long as what they're comfortable using does the job correctly and effectively.

no, i refuse to edit PHP for free. it's not even that i don't enjoy writing in it, i just enjoy writing in other languages much more by comparison.

no problem whatsoever using websites written in PHP. very glad to be able to recommend others to wordpress in lieu of duplicating effort.

I don't use ruby, but that wouldn't prevent me from using gitlab.

Ruby is not anywhere near the same ballpark in terms of the widespread (ir)rational disregard of running anything PHP... especially on our dear-to-heart hand-crafted linux systems... in terms of both security, maintainability, and also the general perception of poor code quality of these OSS projects.

While Ruby might not be well respected among the experienced and snobbish elite programmer class, it hardly instills anything close to the negative reactions that PHP has managed to cultivate over the years.

indeed, i don't write a lot of ruby, either, but i've given it a spin, and i like it alright.

if this were written in ruby, i would be motivated to learn more ruby to edit it.

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