Shiva – More than a RESTful API to your music collection | Hacker News Reader

Shiva – More than a RESTful API to your music collection

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130 pointsrnyman22 comments

This sounds a LOT like zmusic (which I use currently) by Jason Donenfeld: http://git.zx2c4.com/zmusic-ng/about/

(..which is also powered by Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Backbone.js etc.)

So... why not Subsonic? It's open source as well, seems a lot more mature, has a rest api, tons of apps, and a spiffy new HTML5 player that's quite good.

* Subsonic.org seems to be down, try http://sourceforge.net/projects/subsonic/ instead.

Can I use it as an alternative to Google Music? I.e. can I set it to download a playlist to my phone when I come home?

Sorry, I don't quite get it. The web player has support for playlists and dynamic streams, so I guess it depends on whether the app available for your phone uses the correct API. The one I use, for example, maintains a 10gb MRU cache of my stuff (with lookahead) and that works out quite nicely for me. YMMV, but it definitely surpassed google music for me in both usability and quality.

I suspect Java would make at least some of us steer clear. Thinking as purely a user, Subsonic looks great. As a developer that wants to hack around on the code handling my music library for fun, I personally wouldn't want the aggravation as I really can't stand Java.

OT: As per the Hindu calendar, yesterday was Shiva's birthday - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_Shivaratri

Great timing!

Shivratri is not the birthday of Lord Shiva. It is a day celebrated in reverence of Lord Shiva.

This seems incredible. I've been wanting something like this for a while, and figured I'd have to make it myself.

I'll definitely be checking this out.

Ha, actually did spend time making something like this for myself. I prefer to organize music by folder though, so that's how Tailgate does it:

https://github.com/davidguttman/tailgate

A Subsonic-compatible wrapper for the API would instantly add compatibility with a large number of clients. Same for DLNA (spit).

I'm a big Subsonic fan for a couple of reasons:

1. Remote control - I can make the server play the track remotely

2. Configurable offline cache on my phone - I set a large cache size (say 20gb) and use the player normally. Next time I'm offline I've still got access to the last 20gb of music I played.

I'm looking for a Subsonic alternative though as I'd like to use an Android TV stick as my server/media center and getting Java running on that will be a pain and probably involve running a full Linux side-by-side. And I'm not even sure if it's going to be possible to run Subsonic server alongside Android effectively.

A closing thought. Why are these things needed when we have DLNA/UPnP? Mainly because DLNA apps are uniformally slow and lack essential features. It's stunning how much time and money large companies have spent on DLNA and produced something so horrible.

Nice! I've also been thinking about something like this for my photos. I have a ton of photos littered in a pics folder. Would love an API would I could query on EXIF data.

I've also been thinking the same thing recently. I have iPhoto but it sucks for a) big collections and b) sharing. For example, locally you can browse a collection on another local machine but it sends full res photos across the wire so it's completely unusable.

Image support is planned actually (just noticed that is not in the wish list, will add it) but has some big prerequisites. With photos you have to be a little more careful regarding permissions, which means that users and roles should be supported first.

But it will be implemented at some point.

Try a semantic desktop app. If I'm not mistaken, Tracker[1] can index EXIF tags (as well as other metadata formats) and it exposes a SPARQL[2] endpoint that you can query.

[1]: http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL

I'd love to try and install this on my nas4free installation. If anyone has tried and wants to chime in…

My next project will be `Jesus`.

You are late: https://rubygems.org/gems/jesus

"A web interface for god to speak with mankind"

https://rubygems.org/gems/god

That has to be the most clever name for a project I've ever seen.

The REST API looks like its halfway to being an OData one. Why reinvent the wheel and not go the whole hog?

Interestingly it was Shivratri yesterday for Indians - for Shiva, the destroyer God of Hinduism.

Sounds good. Would like to try.

that would be me .. i mean thats my name :P

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