Questions before I try Music Cabinet

[TNRocker]

I have been using Subsonic 4.6 for almost a year. I am running Subsonic on my Mac Mini running 10.6.8 Server. I installed the stand alone Mac without issue and everything works fine. I have about 500 GB of music that has Artist>Album>Song file structure. Everything is tagged. When I installed Subsonic I created a new file structure using Genre>Artist>Album>Song. People like to browse by Genre ....so I have 2 500 GB music collections; one for itunes and one for Subsonic. I went ahead and created a second iTunes library pointed at the Subsonic Media. I use ITunes to create Smart Playlist and Genius playlist that I export to the Subsonic Playlist folder.

so why am I posting.....If I understand Music Cabinet I would be able to browse by Genre allowing me to get down to single media library. Music Cabinet does not use my Genre Meta Data but rather lastfm. I would prefer my tags but I am not sure my users would care. I have been scrobbling to lastfm for at least a year so I am familiar with their genres. The Radio and like artist features sounds awesome.

Everything works great now and I really don't want to screw things up. I can tell most of the Subsonic users are way more tech savy than this old dog so my questions may be on the beginner side so please tread lightly.

Does Music Cabinet work with 4.6 or do I need to upgrade to 4.7? My current scheme for creating play lists doesn't seem like it would work in 4.7. I am hoping Music Cabinet will improve playlist creation for my users but I really like being able to export from iTunes.

I didn't notice a Mac Installer. Do the download links provided work on OS X?

I will re-read what to back up any other tips are welcome.

[hakko]

I'm running MusicCabinet on a Mac Mini and a Mac Mini Server. Last time I checked, Mac support for Java 1.7 was pretty new so there's no simple drag-n-drop installer for OSX, you'd have to get the stand alone zip installer and modify the subsonic.sh script to fit your needs. And you don't get a nice Subsonic icon in the dock/tray anymore.

MusicCabinet is built on top of Subsonic 4.6 but half of the original code or more is replaced by code I've written myself that's more efficient. You can install MusicCabinet either if you're running Subsonic 4.6 or 4.7 and it'll pick up your users and settings. Having vanilla Subsonic installed is not mandatory, the only point of it is that your current users are imported. But then MC will modify the app settings irreversible so you can't go back to 4.6/4.7. Unless you make a backup of /Library/Application Support/Subsonic where all settings are stored.

MC browses your library by tags so you wouldn't need duplicate files to achieve genre browsing. Personally, I import music using iTunes and then I point MC at the folder where iTunes stores everything. So I don't actually care how files are organized, I get genre browsing etc in MC anyway.

Playlist handling in MC is left from Subsonic 4.6 so that wouldn't change. Personally I don't use Genius playlists anymore as the "Artist radio" inside MC achieves the same thing for me (the algorithms are obviously not identical but I find MC to generate playlists where iTunes couldn't)

Just make sure to backup /Library/Application Support/Subsonic before trying, so that you can go back if somethings screws up or if you don't like it.

[TNRocker]

So I backup /Library/Application Support/Subsonic .
Uninstall Java 6 and install java 7
Download and install PostgreSQL 9.1 . Create DB user, port number.

The above seems easy but the following....Download the Subsonic installer and modify the subsonic.sh script to fit my needs. I am viewing the subsonic.sh file with Textedit but I really don't know what I am supposed to edit. And once I edit then what? Like I said I am a bit of a noob but I was able to get Subsonic up and running. I should be able to figure this out. Any additional help would be welcome. This sounds like a perfect mod but I feel like I am missing something????

Thanks in advance!

[hakko]

To use subsonic.sh, you need to get familiar with the Terminal app. I can't really help with that, you can start reading at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29

I'll just admit that the default Subsonic installation is much easier to use on a Mac as it uses Java 6, while I've started using features introduces in Java 7. So I couldn't continue using the same smooth installer. At some point, I should look more into creating a .app bundle for Mac to lower the threshold of using this software.

I'll paste the contents of one of my subsonic.sh startup scripts for Mac here as reference. The path to bin/java needs to be altered depending on your system and so does the locale and the location/name of subsonic-booter...jar and subsonic.war.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

export LC_ALL="sv_SE.UTF-8"
export LANG="sv_SE.UTF-8"

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java \
-Xmx512m \
-cp /Applications/Subsonic.app/Contents/Resources/Java/subsonic-booter-jar-with-dependencies.jar \
-Djava.awt.headless=true \
-Dsubsonic.httpsPort=0 \
-Dsubsonic.port=4040 \
-Dfile.encoding=UTF8 \
-Dsubsonic.war=/Applications/Subsonic.app/Contents/Resources/subsonic.war \
-Dsubsonic.defaultPodcastFolder=/Users/Shared/Podcasts \
-Dsubsonic.contextPath=/ \
-Dsubsonic.defaultMusicFolder=/Users/Shared/Music \
-Dsubsonic.home='/Library/Application Support/Subsonic' \
-Dsubsonic.defaultPlaylistFolder=/Users/Shared/Playlists net.sourceforge.subsonic.booter.Main \
-mac


[TNRocker]

I have used Terminal in the past so it is not totally unfamiliar. My sudo powers are weak but I will review and see if I can't figure this out. Thanks for providing the sample script. If I understand, I leave everything in the script the same and just add correct path to bin/java, the locale and the location/name of subsonic-booter.jar and subsonic.war

I will be sure to have back up and I use Carbon Copy Cloner. If I break something I can always restore .....I appreciate your patience.

[hakko]

The names of the files in the zip differ slightly (subsonic-booter.jar and subsonic-main.war) from the Subsonic 4.6 setup so either rename them to match the subsonic.sh script, or edit the script to match the file names.

[TNRocker]

Thanks and I appreciate the fast responses. I like the way you stay on top of forum posts. I noticed another post regarding video. I didn't realize I lost this feature in MC. (or do I???) Do you have any suggestions for a video solution. I had a friend (programmer) look at the script you provided and he told me installing MC would be a snap. I had planned on installing MC this weekend. However I need video support......do you stream video and if so what do you use?

[lishper]

Alright hopefully it's fine that I hijack this thread.

I'm also attempting to run this on a Mac Mini running Mountain Lion 10.8.2, and I'll admit I'm lost on actually getting it set-up.

I've already installed Java 7 and I have installed the latest version of postgresql. I don't see any traces of Java 6 on the machine.

Since I'm on a Mac I downloaded the standalone-version linked on your site. After running the subsonic.sh script through Terminal and going to localhost:4040 I'm getting this error:

"HTTP ERROR: 503

Problem accessing /. Reason:

Service Unavailable
Powered by Jetty://"

From what I read in the subsonic.sh script it shouldn't matter about defining where my folders are because once subsonic is running I can modify all of those paths through the web interface. I don't have a clue now where to troubleshoot.

Thanks.

[hakko]

The subsonic.sh script references two files, subsonic-main.war and subsonic-booter.jar. Make sure you use those two files from the zip installer and not files from a previous Subsonic install.

The subsonic.sh script also needs to reference a Java 7 virtual machine. I've personally just changed the script to reference the Java 7 install on my machine, which is found in /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java.

Error 503 is normally caused by one of these two not set up correctly. To get more information, you could probably check subsonic_sh.log (which is created by the subsonic.sh script) or paste the content of it here.

[lishper]

Thanks for the assistance.

The problem was that I didn't correctly define the path to subsonic home. I mistyped and last night going over it I didn't catch any mistakes. It was easy to see this morning.