Agatha 0.7.2 review

Agatha is a Web-based MP3 playing system that allows the home user or office group to stream music, create, manage, and share play li

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: JimmyDigital

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Agatha is a Web-based MP3 playing system that allows the home user or office group to stream music, create, manage, and share play lists, and control the playing of music on a remote system. Agatha does not require a database and has full play-on-server support.

Tested with apache 1.3.x and php 4.x under linux.. This program is not guaranteed to
do anything but take up space on your disk..

Also note that this was designed to be used on a private network. I'm sure there are terrible security holes... so treat it accordingly.

Installing

Since you are reading this.. I guess you already unpacked the tar ball... Just move/rename this directory to whatever you like under your apache document root (htdocs) directory and point your browser to it.

All files should be readable by apache.. and the 'playlists' and 'sharedplaylists' directories should be writable by the apache user.

Copy config.php.dist to config.php and edit your path and language file names. For security purposes.. please note that neither playlists nor mp3s need to be visible by your web server.

LOCAL PLAY SETUP:

To use the (very cool) local play features of agatha you will need to install a perl package. This can most easily be done via CPAN with the command (as root):

perl -MCPAN -e 'install MP3::Daemon'

This perl package will also let you play music from the command line. As a test to verify everything is working.. try the command:

mp3 play song.mp3

Where song.mp3 is a file from your drive...

Once it is installed and you have verified that you can play mp3s from the command line.. you need to make a few small changes.

If it is running.. kill the daemon with:

mp3 quit

Using your favorite text editor.. open up the file /usr/bin/mp3. You need to change the location of the socket that the mp3daemon uses to something that agatha can reach... I suggest using /tmp/.mp3 as the new location. Look for the following line near the top.. and change it as I've indicated:

FROM:
my $conf_dir = "$ENV{HOME}/.mp3";

TO:
my $conf_dir = "/tmp/.mp3";

Whatever location you use.. you will need to put the same path in the agatha config file.

There are a few device files in /dev that the apache user will need to have permissions for. There are many ways this can be done.. I'll list the easiest way here. If you have a need for better security in this regard I'm sure you will know the other ways this can be accomplished.

chmod o+r,o+w /dev/mixer
chmod o+r,o+w /dev/dsp

That's it... just read through the agatha config file and set a few paths.. there are comments in the file to help you.

Usage

Click the song name to stream.. select several songs and click submit to stream the list. Or.. if 'Add to Playlist' is selected you can add the list of selected songs to a new or existing playlist.

Edit the list by clicking on the white icon next to the name. Click the red symbol icon to play on the local server using the perl package mp3daemon.

For recursive play.. click the little folder icons to stream whole directories and the red icons to play on the server. Everything else should be fairly straight forward.

What's New in This Release:
MP3 file extensions are now case-insensitive.
A bug where playing recursive directories from other than the top level would fail was fixed.