It seems like most of the world is content on accessing their media through streaming. For any number of reasons, I prefer to keep actual copies of books, TV, movies, and music. Other plebeians seem to be happy renting the media they want for a monthly fee. After acquiring some decent quality IEM’s, I thought it was time to make sure I could access my audio library on the go. While I could pull the files through SSH and access them using, say, SSHFS, it took little time for me to get frustrated with this inelegant solution. I had previously used GNUMP3d on a LAMP machine to pull music over the Internet. That was a great piece of software, and it worked very well. I decided go a different way this time as the project hasn’t been updated since 2007 and there are better alternatives in these halcyon modern times. This led me to Ampache, which is modern, maintained, and open source.
Ampache is a web application that runs on anything that has the necessary basic components. In this case what we need are and HTTP server, PHP for scripting, and a MySQL database server. Since I am a glutton for punishment, I decided to pick the best of each of these components and see if I could hack it all together and make it work. Picking the “best” HTTP server is a largely masturbatory exercise. This is much like arguing the merits of other holy software such as text editors. Going by just the facts you’d have to agree that the fastest web server software is going to be NGINX. If NGINX is fast enough to approach the outer limits of 10,000 concurrent connections, it should be good enough for this use-case. As for PHP, there is little choice there. Happily, there is a bit of choice with our database server. Ever since Larry Ellison and his band of money-grubbing devils sunk Sun Microsystems, MySQL has been tainted. Luckily, mariadb came along to return our precious freedom.
As far as ampache goes, I have found it to be slick, fast, and intuitive. There are plenty of features buried in there as well. About half of my music is stored as FLAC, which is high bitrate and quite large. I told ampache to transcode this on the fly, and it promptly told me to install ffmpeg. So after that little altercation, I can access my FLAC as more WAN appropriate V4 mp3. The interface is pretty slick. The media player pops up at the bottom as soon an you start playing anything. Playlists can be made and saved on the fly.
If you are looking for a solution for sharing your music over the web, I would check it out.