Cannen Collaborative Music Player

Cannen is a collaborative music player written to use Django and MPD. It is designed to have a very simple interface: users upload music files from their own computer, or submit song URLs, and Cannen will play them. Cannen adds submitted songs to the main playlist in a round-robin style from all the users that have submitted songs, to be as fair as possible.

Requirements

• Python
• Django
• MPD
• python-mpd (>= 0.3.0)

Optional

• Icecast (for streaming your radio station)
• pyftpdlib (>= 0.7.0, for the FTP upload server)

Demo Project

Cannen comes with a demonstration Django project in demo/ that you can use to quickly see Cannen in action. Inside that directory, run

python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py runserver

to create a test database and start up a Django test server at localhost:8000. To run a demo player that "plays" each song for 10 seconds, run python manage.py runcannen in another terminal.

Installation

Cannen requires a running instance of MPD, and setting this up is simple but beyond the scope of this README. See the Configuration article on the MPD wiki. Cannen will require write access to the MPD music directory, since it will store uploaded songs in $MPD_MUSIC_DIR/uploaded. The easiest way to do this is to run MPD on the same machine running Cannen, but you can get away with a network share.

If you want other people to listen to the music, you'll likely want to stream it out through Icecast, which will involve setting up an Icecast server. Again, this is outside the scope of this README. Cannen doesn't care what MPD does with the music once it gets it.

Once MPD is set up, you will need to install Cannen on your Django site. Copy the cannen directory into your site directory, and add cannen to your INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py. While you're there, add the following line:

CANNEN_BACKEND = ('cannen.backends.mpd.MPDBackend', 'localhost', 6600, '/path/to/mpd/music')

Replace the last 3 parts with your MPD host, port, and the path to the MPD music directory. If you have an MPD password, add it at the end like so:

CANNEN_BACKEND = ('cannen.backends.mpd.MPDBackend', 'localhost', 6600, '/path/to/mpd/music', 'password')

Finally, you need to add Cannen to your URL router. You can do this by adding the following line to your urlpatterns in urls.py:

    url(r'^radio/', include('cannen.urls')),

This will put Cannen at the URL http://yourdomain.com/radio/. Feel free to put it wherever you want it. Finally, remember to run python manage.py syncdb to install the Cannen tables, and if needed, python manage.py collectstatic to install Cannen's static files.

Running the Playlist Manager

Cannen needs a secondary process to run in the background to manage the playlist, apart from the main Django process that serves the website. In order to run this process, run python ./manage.py runcannen inside your site directory.

Running the FTP Upload Server

Cannen has an FTP server that you can run in the background to allow your users to easily upload a lot of songs at once. This server requires pyftpdlib version 0.7.0 or later, and it also requires that your Django authentication backend supports password-based logins. This means that the FTP server will not work for OAuth-based backends, however, some OAuth backends also allow each user to have a local password.

To run the FTP upload server, run python ./manage.py runcannenftp inside your site directory.

Extra Considerations

By default, Cannen is only available to logged-in users. This means you need to give people a way to log in at all, so if you're setting this up yourself you might want to create a few simple log in and registration pages for people to use. Check out the Django documentation for more details.

Other Settings

CANNEN_GARBAGE_COLLECT

By default, Cannen will delete uploaded files as soon as they are played. If you do not wish for this to happen, set CANNEN_GARBAGE_COLLECT to False in your settings file.

CANNEN_ENABLE_LIBRARY

Cannen also has a library feature which, by default, is disabled. To enable this feature, set CANNEN_ENABLE_LIBRARY to True in your settings file. To get the most out of your Library experience, you'll likely want to disable the garbage collector as well, as listed directly above.

CANNEN_UPLOAD_DIR

If you want to store your uploaded songs somewhere other than uploaded/, you can change this by setting CANNEN_UPLOAD_DIR.

CANNEN_LISTEN_URLS

If you are running an Icecast stream, you can set the CANNEN_LISTEN_URLS setting to a list of (name, url) tuples to show on the default template. For example,

CANNEN_LISTEN_URLS = [
   ('MP3', '/streams/radio.mp3'),
   ('Vorbis', '/streams/radio.ogg'),
]

CANNEN_TITLE

You can also set the title on the default template with CANNEN_TITLE.