Music Machinery

A few people have asked me the steps to go through to  install playdar. Official instructions are here:  Playdar source code. This is what I did to get it running on my Mac:

• Download and install XCode from Apple
• Download build and install Erlang
• Install MacPorts if you haven’t already done so
• Download and install git
• Install Taglib
• Grab the latest Playdar source: 
git clone git://github.com/RJ/playdar-core.git
• Build it by typing ‘make’ at the top level
• Copy etc/playdar.conf.example to etc/playdar.conf
• If you want to include the Echo Nest resolver do these bits:
  • Get an Echo Nest API key from here:  developer.echonest.com
  • Download and install pyechonest (the python client for the Echo Nest library):
  • Add your Echo Nest API key to echonest-resolver.py (at around line 22)
  • Make sure the echonest-resolver.py is executable (chmod +x path/to/contrib/echonest-resolver.py)
  • Edit etc/playdar.conf and add the path to the resolver in the scripts list.   Line 22-26 should look something like this:

    {scripts,[
     "/Users/plamere/tools/playdar-core/contrib/echonest/echonest-resolver.py"
     %"/path/to/a/resolver/script1.py",
     %"/path/to/a/resolver/script2.py"
    ]}.

• If you want to enable p2p sharing remove “p2p” from the module blacklist in the playdar.conf (around line 59)
• start Playdar with:

   ./start-dev.sh

• To add your local music to playdar – in a separate window type:
  ./playdarctl start-debug
  ./playdarctl scan /path/to/your/music
• At this point, playdar should be running.  You can check its status by going to:

  http://localhost:60210/

• Try Playdar by going to http://www.playdar.org/demos/search.html.  Click the ‘connect’ button to connect to Playdar – then search for a track – if Playdar finds it, it should appear in the search results. Start listening to music. Then  visit Playlick and start building playlists.
• If p2p is enabled you can add a friends music collection to Playdar by typing this into the Erlang console window:

  p2p_router:connect("hostname.example.com", 3389).

That’s a long way to go to get Playdar installed – so it is still only for the highly motivated, but people are working on making this easy – so if you aren’t ready to spend an hour tinkering with installs, wait a few days and there will be an easier way to install it all.