Gramola

Gramola is a lightweight web music player, written in pure Javascript.

• Node.js and the Express framework for the backend
• JQuery and JPlayer for the frontend
• Powered by a Sqlite database

Key features

• Accepts mp3 and ogg files.
• Prepared to deal with huge collections of music.
• Minimal overhead. Runs neatly on a Raspberry Pi!
• "Files and folders over MD5 tags" philosophy.
• Responsive interface that looks pretty even on phones.
• Easily find folders, or set them to play in infinite random mode.
• Favorite or blacklist songs, and make your own buckets.
• Your music is private by default, but you can easily share it.

Install

Gramola depends on nodejs and sqlite3 being installed in your system. For debian-based distributions this can be achieved with:

sudo apt-get install nodejs sqlite3

Then clone this repository, and install the required node packages with:

npm install

Run

First run the server with:

node app.js

Now you an access the client web interface on http://localhost:8890

The first time you access the webapp you will be presented with a form to create the admin user and point to your music folder.

After this is done, you'll be redirected to the Gramola interface. You should see your music collection on the right side. Click on some songs to add them to the playlist on the left side, and start listening!

Configuration

Gramola makes use of the node-env-file format for loading configuration.

You can either set up the configuration as environment variables in your shell, or have an .env file at the root of the repo containing them in bash format.

The repo includes an example configuration file in env_sample. You can make a copy of this file and then edit it to suit your needs:

cp env_sample .env
nano .env  # or your editor of choice

Troubleshoot

Installation woes

Gramola has been developed to work fine under Node 0.10.x. Newer versions of Node might work, but are untested.

If you are having trouble with the version of node coming with your system, you can use a nodeev to install the correct one:

nodeenv --node=0.10.25 --prebuilt env-0.10.25-prebuilt

You might also be able to fix the installation in newer versions of node by installing the node-gyp package. For Ubuntu you would do:

npm install -g node-gyp

Forcing the database to update

All of your music collection is indexed into an sqlite database to allow for cool stuff such as searches or the random mode to be possible.

The server auto-syncs the database to the music collection at regular intervals (by default every 5 minutes, but this can be adjusted via configuration). However, in-between intervals it may happen that you notice that certain functions of the player are not up to date with your collection, if you made recent changes to it.

You can force a sync of the collection by hitting the /collection/refresh endpoint:

curl http://localhost:8890/collection/refresh

If all goes well, you will see this:

{"error": false}

Contribute

If you wish to contribute simply raise a pull request or open a ticket to report any issues. Whatever your contribution it will be very welcome!