MusicDB 8.0.0 - Planned for beginning 2022

[rstemmer]

MusicDB 8.0.0 - Planned for beginning 2022

MusicDB was always a music management system with strong focus on having fun listening to music. Since the first prototype the presentation of the music had highest priority. The user should never get the feeling that he/she uses software when discovering and listening to the music collection.

Managing the music collection (files and directories) is a totally different topic and has been neglect in the past. There were just a couple of command line tools to manage the music. So the music had to be copied on the server via scp, then the user had to connect to the server via ssh to then run musicdb add, or worse musicdb database … && musicdb artwork ….

Installation and update of MusicDB was even worse. There have been multiple attempts to make it as easy as possible, but it was never a joy.

The struggle with managing music and maintaining the MusicDB installation will finally be addressed with the new version of MusicDB.

The Vision:

• One Easy User Interface - Web front-end only instead of command line
• Easy System Integration - Using default system paths and systemd
• Easy Installation and Update - Install, Uninstall, Update via package manager like pacman, apt, yum …

To achieve these goals there will be some major changes in the upcoming version of MusicDB. These changes are proposed in the following sections.

Integration into the System

In the previous versions of MusicDB the software and data was isolated from the rest of the operating system installed into /opt/musicdb. The server and streaming infrastructure was managed with a set of scripts to start and stop the server and an Icecast process detached from the systemd.

With the new version of MusicDB this will end. Beginning with 8.0.0 MusicDB will be integrated into the operating system. This allows handling MusicDB via systemd. You can also auto-start the server after booting including its dependency Icecast. Additionally you can use the package manager of your system for easy installation and updates.

New File Structure

The integration of MusicDB into the operating system leads to some major changes in the file tree. All binary files and Python modules will now be installed at the place they belong to. So you can for example simply import a MusicDB Python module from your own Python script. All data managed by MusicDB are now placed at /var/lib/musicdb by default (can be changed in the configuration).

Continuation of WebUI 3

Some minor changed with huge impact is the continuation of the third generation of the web front-end (WebUI 3) introduced with MusicDB 7.0.0. All management that has been done with several command lines tools in the past, will now be possible from the web front-end. This includes uploading new music to the server and importing them into the Music Database.

It will also be possible to connect from the web front-end to the audio stream served by Icecast via an integrated stream player.
Of course it is possible to configure a user name and password to connect to a password secured audio stream.

Everything related to music management tasks will of course be hidden in the settings, so that the original idea of the UI to not provide the experience of using software will remain.

Easy transition

Despite all those huge changes, the transition from MusicDB 7.2.0 to the new 8.0.0 will be easy. There will be a step-by-step documentation of the transition to guarantee that no data will be lost.

Release

MusicDB 8.0.0 should be released in the first quarter of 2022.

At least this is the plan. In the past this was always a good period for major releases because of the winter vacation period.

Progress of the work can be seen on the corresponding GitHub Project page for Release 8.0.0.

I plan to provide packages for Arch Linux, Fedora 35 and maybe Raspbian.
Anyway, there will be an instruction to install MusicDB from source so that it can be run on any modern Linux system that comes with Python 3.8+.