Comments on: How can I make my own MeFi Music clone?

Question: How can I make my own MeFi Music clone?

40 Watt — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:37:19 -0800

Help me make a private community-based mp3 blog, very much like, say... MeFi Music.

I have a very small, invite-only group of friends who regularly get together via mailing list to discuss our latest favorite music, shared via remotely hosted SFTP site. It's worked OK for a number of years now, but I'd like to maybe make it into something a little easier to use and more flexible. SFTP can be a pain for a number of reasons, and I like the MeFi Music interface of just being able to upload a song and have it just show up on the page, with a simple little Flash player and a space for people to add info or comments.

I've poked around with various high and low-powered CMS systems, such as Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, MovableType and others but I'm not sure how much I really need to use in order to make this happen.(I know MeFi is based on ColdFusion which I know very little about, and Matt isn't about to hand out the source anyway.) Ideally, we're talking about restricting access to a select group of logins, allowing all users to upload (and add info to) songs, and have a way for other users to comment on uploaded music. I'm looking for: 1.) which CMS to use, 2.) plugins or extensions to add to get the functionality I'm looking for and 3.) fairly easy for me to install and operate. I know my way around (X)HTML and a little PHP, but I'm not a huge code monkey and I don't have a lot of time to invest in writing stuff by hand.

Any ideas?

By: amyms

amyms — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:50:47 -0800

I don't know anything about coding and the like, but I've used LiveDigital successfully to upload music I want to share with friends (you can make your uploads "private" and invite people to listen, which seems to fit your criteria of a very small, invite-only group of friends). Check it out and see if it meets your needs.

By: 40 Watt

40 Watt — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:58:24 -0800

Thanks, amyms, that would do the trick but I'm trying to keep it on the down-low as far as hosting and data storage are concerned. I guess I should clarify- This needs to be hosted on our own servers, no third-party sites. Not that we're doing anything illegal, but we'd like to keep it a totally private affair.

By: cortex

cortex — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:14:01 -0800

I've never fiddled with the upload management side, but for thread-based player-plus-comments stuff you can set something up fairly easily with Wordpress and a small flash player. If you look at what I've got set up over here (cue ironic 1995 Under Construction icon), that's basically it: CMS-driven threads on WP with flash player and click through to comments. The basic setup for that in Wordpress is braindead easy -- all the work is in theming/styling with just a touch of php hacker if you want to get fancy.

I've been using a couple different free flash players—mefi music uses the player from Jeroen Wijering (and, on review, a pretty old version of it), which is entirely solid and pretty dang configurable besides. Recommended.

If you've worked with WP or done a CMS install before, we're talking cinch territory for all that. If not, maybe a bit bumpier but still pretty non-rocket-science stuff.

By: 40 Watt

40 Watt — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:22:40 -0800

Hmm... well, that's a good start, cortex, many thanks. How are you doing the uploading/file management? Through WP's god-awful file manager thingy? I'm pretty handy with WP, so I could probably throw something like that together, but I've yet to find a decent file management plugin that takes care of the uploading and player linking and all that as simply as I'd like.

By: 40 Watt

40 Watt — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:27:31 -0800

oh, and I really like Jeroen's player... it's nice and simple. All I guess I need now is a way for users to upload an mp3 and have it instantly show up as that player controller without having to go through any sort of crappy file browser interface.

By: noloveforned

noloveforned — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 05:48:55 -0800

podcastgen - it won't give you comments but it's a dead simple way to upload and share mp3s. it's designed for podcasts, so it has rss built in too

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 10:00:03 -0800

I don't touch WP's file manager stuff; I just upload via ftp or scp to some web space I maintain, and manually tag a given post with the url of the song in a custom field that the player then gets fed via a little php call.

Which works fine for my purposes but is a bit more manual than what you have in mind, I think. That component is honestly something I'd like to hear about when you get it figured out. :)