Web Galleries for Music Files?
March 25, 2006 7:50 PM   Subscribe

I want to interact with my music library over a network and be able to add notes, links, etc. to each item. Looking for static or dynamic approaches . . .

Does anyone know of a free/opensource/consumer-priced personal version of something (for OS X) that catalogs a digital music collection (either the contents of a folder of tracks or XML output from iTunes) and outputs a static web interface that I can serve, edit, embed in a template, etc., and that would include a link to the audio track (mp3s in every case, so they'll play on anything) in its output? It's the same idea as scripts that auto-generate a simple web gallery from a directory of images.

I'm also curious about dynamic solutions to this challenge. I'm aware of SlimServer, and that's got possibilities. I am intrigued by the idea of integrating a dynamic interface with my iTunes library with a wiki where I could add notes and other kinds of metadata to tracks that could be summoned from within a browser.
SQLTunes can send iTunes XML to an existing SQL database. So half the job is done with that, if it were to be a dynamic application. Is there a module for some major CMS or Wiki that could integrate this easily? Or a standalone server/portal?

I'm running OS X 10.4 client (and OS X 10.3.9 Server on my server, if it matters, and I can install any CMS backend for just this purpose). I don't have the chops to do this completely from scratch in PHP. It seems so obvious i can't believe no one has done it, but I can't find anything.

Sorry this was long.
posted by fourcheesemac to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
It ain't pretty, but someone's developed a php front end for sqltunes available here. A little tweaking can get it to be better looking, and you could easily robustify the code. But I don't think you want to trust any third party app to alter your iTunes tags.
posted by kimota at 8:07 PM on March 25, 2006


You know, you've got me wondering if some combination of Quicksilver/ Growl/ Gmail/ AppleScript might not get you the ability to push various tag edits from remote locations. Like, you could use Quicksilver or just Gmail to send yourself an email using a pretty strict syntax, like 'where title ='My Way' and artist like Sinatra or like Vicious write composer = Paul Anka, Jacques Reveaux' and then have Growl push the syntax to an AppleScript that would then edit the tags. Sqltunes currently/ temporarily lacks the ability to automate exporting the xml file to mysql, though.
posted by kimota at 8:46 PM on March 25, 2006


Response by poster: Thanks kimota. That script is very rough and ready, but interesting. I wonder if he ever integrated it with Media Wiki, as his blog post implied he was thinking about.

Much of music is untagged and one thing I am trying to do is start a collaborative tagging exercise -- open to anyone interested in the kind of stuff I want to serve - for audio tracks that are not in any database and were ripped from analog sources that are not available on cds, so there's no metadata out there to import either. So I am willing to let my itunes tags be modified, or created.

SlimServer is interesting, but as far as I can tell it only supports streaming mp3, and I doesn't support modification of the database. I imagine the audio files uploaded to a web directory and fully downloadable from a link in the output php (or static html) page. (There are no copyright issues here).

I could do this easily (if ugly) if I had all my data in a Filemaker database with container fields for audio, . Maybe a better question is, can I output iTunes XML to Filemaker? I know I could go *through* SQL and then into FM, but that's a pain in the ass and fraught with errors if you have multiple tables in the dB.
posted by fourcheesemac at 9:55 PM on March 25, 2006


iTunesCatalog would seem to do some of what you're asking for, with the advantage that it makes it very easy to add artwork to your iTunes library. I'm not sure how much you can tinker with it though - it's a Cocoa app designed more for people who want to, say, show their friends their CD library via a .Mac homepage without much effort (which is how I've used it). But it has a free trial so you could always check out how much you can customise for your needs.
posted by hgws at 10:35 PM on March 25, 2006


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