I've been trying for a long time to find something that will match my music needs, but I think I give up, so I have finally decided to release my "Adorno" music server out into the big blue room.

Some people suggested Amarok, but while it does have some web interface plugins they really are Teh Suck(tm) for all-the-time use. Using Amarok over an SSH connection seems to soak network bandwidth to the max, as well, and is quite sluggish. Amarok is nice, but I don't play my music on the computer in front of me.

I looked at SlimServer, but it requires me to run some Java doohickey on the music player which (surprise, surprise) expects the server to have a GUI.

I looked at MPD as well. This is probably the closest thing to something I could use, and if I hadn't already written my own music server years ago I would probably go with this. As it is I have something which kind of works, and which has records of the last 20,000 odd tracks I have played. It only really has a few bugs, which are minor enough to have not been fixed for a couple of years, so I should just get stuck in and do the work.

What crystallised this chain of thoughts for me was yesterday, when everyone got a wee bit excited about the Catalyst IT group on last.fm I decided to finally sign up for an account on there. Of course if I had an account, I had to have some way of actually putting my playlist on there...

... 10 minutes later I had managed to find the Audio::Scrobbler library, and an hour later I had hacked the support for it into Adorno. Looking through the code of the music daemon component of Adorno I realise it ain't that bad. There are a few improvements it could do with, but the basic approach works just fine.

So I'm now listening to Charles Mingus, and it's all being scrobbled up to (by?) last.fm, although I guess strictly this isn't all going to be my choice of music. Under pressure from one of the shorter members of the household I have been known to play "The Wiggles", "Buzz O Bumble" and other stuff I am heartily sick of, but which he continues to adore.

So now I had firmly committed to releasing my code, I had to get rid of the revision control on there (I was using Darcs, since that's the project I was starting when I wanted to try Darcs out) and replace it with Git. I don't think there is any value in retaining all my old history so I just moved the _darcs directory out of the way and "cg-init" in the root of the project.

Then back on my laptop, I just clone from the remote project root and start editing away. Eventually I decide to "cg-push" and my changes go back into the project root on the music server. Except, of course they don't: they go back into the .git directory in there and when I ssh in and run cg-status in the project root it wants to undo all my good works! I think that's a bad Andrew for even thinking of doing something so stupid! So I'm now using "cg-reset" to put my code into operation on my music server. Ouch!

Oh well, I guess that means that Debian packaging must be early on the list :-)