MusicCabinet announcements

[hakko]

This is the official announcements thread for MusicCabinet, an open-source mod for Subsonic that allows for:

• automatic playlists, based on an artist
• automatic playlists, based on a genre
• browsing your library by genre
• artist images, biographies and more

MusicCabinet has it's own homepage with a demo and installation instructions here: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/

The idea of this thread is to make a single post whenever a new version is available, so that users of the mod can subscribe and be notified of new updates.

Please post all subsequent bug reports, feature requests, complaints and heads up in this forum thread.
(Dear moderators, please move or remove post by others from this thread.)

[hakko]

Thanks to a report from jacobthe4th, I found a couple of bugs which have been addressed and fixed.

• an unlikely but possible data import crash when last.fm returns malformed data
• a database error regarding storage of lowercase/uppercase artist names

The release that fixes these issues has version number 0.5.48 and is available here: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war
For the changes to take affect, you have to go to Settings -> MusicCabinet after logging in as administrator. Press the button and wait while the database gets repaired. (It took 10sec for my 50.000 tracks database)

-----------

Parallel with this bugfix, I've recently been working on issues related to the inner workings of Subsonic.

Subsonic is built on a framework called Spring 2.5.6 and a security framework called Acegi, released back in 2007. The passwords of all Subsonic users are stored in (hex) clear text, wide open to see for an admin or an intruder.

I think this is an obvious security flaw and I've therefore updated it to Spring 3.1 and Spring security, released in 2011. User passwords are now stored as salted hash sums.

This version is called 0.6.1 and is available here: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-beta.war. (Rename to subsonic.war when installing.)

Please note that this overwrites previous passwords for all your users, so there's no going back. The change is invisible to your users, they can log in just as usual. But make sure to do a backup before installation, in case of bugs. LDAP authentication is not yet supported in 0.6. Other issues may arise as well.

Please post any feedback regarding these updates in this forum thread.

[hakko]

User vollbr0t pointed out another possible uppercase/lowercase bug in the artist relation import. Thanks for finding it!

Updated versions of MusicCabinet to get rid of this:
0.5.49 (meant to be the stable build):
http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war

0.6.2 (running on Spring 3.1 with hashed passwords, more experimental):
http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-beta.war

To fix it, log in as administrator, go to Settings -> MusicCabinet, and press the Update database button.

[hakko]

User vollbr0t found a bug that might occur and temporarily halt the import of new data, if last.fm sends malformed artist top tags. Thanks!

The stable release (0.5) has been fixed accordingly and updated to version 0.5.50. It can be downloaded from:
http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war

No functionality changes whatsoever apart from that.

I'm currently working on the next generation, which can compared to the upgrades done by Sindre from 4.6 to 4.7. A lot of work done, but a lot still left. I'll post here when something's ready for testing.

Please post any further questions in this forum thread..

[hakko]

I'm happy to announce the next beta release of MusicCabinet, 0.7!

This version leaves the previous semi-directory, semi-tagged interface behind. From now on, browsing your library is completely based on file tags, gathered by the new built-in media scanner. (But if you need to, you can switch to browsing your library as a simple directory tree for instant access to music and videos.)

What's in it:

• added: tagged based browsing, with a minimal file based fallback alternative
• added: faster load time for artist page, especially with large number of albums
• added: lower memory and disk space usage
• added: genre drop down list to filter artists in left column
• added: option to only display letters A-Z in left column, and load artists on click
• added: 'star' artists, albums and songs
• added: recently played artists, albums and songs
• added: most played artists, albums and songs
• added: search filter in recently added, recently played, most played and starred
• added: a black user interface, thanks to precipitous
• added: delayed scrobbling (don't register songs you're skipping through)
• added: configurable whether to prefer last.fm artwork vs. local artwork (embedded and folder/cover.*)
• added: configuration for number of artists, albums, songs and grid columns
• added: security update: store user passwords as salted hash sums instead of clear text
• added: security update: store last.fm passwords as hashed session keys instead of clear text
• added: offline scan (just look for new files), quick scan (just add last.fm info for new artists), full scan
• added: scanning your library no longer blocks searching nor Home tab
• added: probably quite a few bugs

• removed: ldap authentication
• removed: comments for albums
• removed: ratings for albums / highest rated album view
• removed: previous play counts for directories (albums)
• removed: media folder drop down list in left pane and in random song generator
• removed: wap interface
• removed: existing shares will be dropped
• removed: notifications of new subsonic versions

I have to stress that this is a beta containing thousands and thousands of lines of new code. If you and your users are happy with 0.5/0.6, you might wanna stick to it for a while.

MusicCabinet 0.7 uses some new features introduced in Java 7, so if you're using Java 6, you need to upgrade. Going back to other Subsonic versions after installing is not possible, as they store user passwords in clear-text. Make backups before installation. (To support downgrading back to MusicCabinet 0.5/0.6, also make a PostgreSQL copy using pg_dump).

Play statistics and starred tracks/albums/artists in MusicCabinet 0.7 requires a last.fm account to work.

After installing, log in with administrator rights and go to Settings -> MusicCabinet. Press Upgrade database and wait patiently until it's done.

Please post bug reports in this thread. Include the files listed at About -> Bug report. Make a copy of them immediately on errors - they get overwritten once you restart Subsonic. If it does work, I'd be interested to hear that as well.

Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
*ix users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... encies.jar and http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-beta.war (rename this to subsonic.war)
MacOSX users: Same as for *ix users, but you need a startup script instead of the previous .app bundle. I use a bash script: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.sh

[hakko]

A few changes to the 0.7 release:

• added: include tracks found on compilation albums in artist view
• fixed: match songs when searching for artists only present on compilation albums
• fixed: allow multiple tracks with same name on albums if disc/track number differ
• fixed: an encoding issue for macosx
• fixed: password for rest api being displayed
• fixed: asynchronous deletion of media folders
• fixed: random/recent/frequent/newest album lists for apps

If you're already using version 0.7, download http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-beta.war, rename to subsonic.war and replace your current one. Otherwise, follow the same steps as in previous post.
After installing, log in as administrator, go to Settings -> MusicCabinet and press Upgrade database. This might take a little while, just be patient and wait.

There are more open issues with 0.7 than what's being addressed here, but I think that this way of including tracks from compilation albums is worth putting out for feedback.

[hakko]

I finally had time today to address issues reported for the 0.7 release:

• added: search now includes artists only found on compilation albums
• added: configuration option for only including album artists when browsing "Genres" and "Related artists"
• added: shortcut for playing genre radio, if a genre is selected in left column
• added: database updates are now automatically loaded on start-up (no more "Upgrade database")
• added: in the "now playing" view, currently playing track is now marked bold for quicker identification
• fixed: failed scrobbling crashing interface (hopefully)
• fixed: "remember me" works better after session timeout (hopefully)
• fixed: error message about elevating on some Windows installations (hopefully)
• fixed: tag info update bug
• fixed: accidentally removed images are back again

Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
*ix users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... encies.jar and http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-beta.war (rename this to subsonic.war)
MacOSX users: Same as for *ix users, but you need a startup script instead of the previous .app bundle. I use a bash script: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.sh

[hakko]

Time for another update to the 0.7 release - partial folder scanning!

My media collection is about 6000 folders on an encrypted hard drive and scanning through all of them takes a few minutes. So, I decided to add another feature I've had in mind - a new view for browsing your library by file structure, but based on the metadata gathered by the media scanner rather than by actual directory content. This allows for two useful features:

• navigate to and display albums based on file structure
• if you know you've added a file or a directory somewhere, start scanning from there, instead of scanning everything.

I'm throwing this out even though it's not really finished/polished to allow for early feedback.

This release also contains a bug fix, to have album artists re-appear in the left frame, and to return them among artists in search results.

Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
*ix users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... encies.jar (not necessary for 0.7 updates) and http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-beta.war (rename this to subsonic.war)
MacOSX users: Same as for *ix users, but you need a startup script instead of the previous .app bundle. I use a bash script: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.sh

[hakko]

New release available - 0.7.6 with feature list:

• tag correction. tags fetched from last.fm are manually entered and thereby error-prone. you can now tell MusicCabinet that "hip hop" is just a misspelled variant of "hip-hop" and have artist tagged as "hip hop" appear as merged when you're browsing "hip-hop" artists and generating playlists.
• related artists sampler playlist. if you'd like to quickly evaluate the related artists of another band, there's now a new play button next to "Related artists". it creates a playlist with the three top tracks for each artist in the related artists list. the number of top tracks is configurable. http://imgur.com/VfRdy
• a few improvements to the library scanning, making it a bit faster.
• two fixes to the new file tree view.

If you're already using 0.7, you can just replace your subsonic.war with http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-beta.war (rename this to subsonic.war)

Otherwise, install Java 7 and then use:
Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
*ix users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... encies.jar and http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-beta.war (rename this to subsonic.war)
MacOSX users: Same as for *ix users, but you need a startup script instead of the previous .app bundle. I use a bash script: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.sh

Post bug reports and comments in this thread as usual.

[hakko]

New release available - 0.7.7 with feature list:

• Genre recommendations. Just like you get recommendations on related artists not yet in your library, the same system is now in place on the Genres page. So when you visit the "post-rock" page, it now summarizes the most popular post-rock artists from last.fm that are missing in your library. (available after a nightly scan, or a normal scan from settings page)
• Bugfix: external playlists
• Bugfix: album artwork in REST API

I'll hereby consider the 0.7 release stable enough to replace the previous 0.5 branch. Thanks to everyone who helped out testing and reporting bugs!


If you're already using 0.7, you can just replace your subsonic.war with http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war

Otherwise, install Java 7 and then use:
Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
Stand-alone version: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... dalone.zip

[hakko]

New release available - 0.7.8 with feature list:

• Last.fm personal artist recommendations. A new view is added to the Home screen, where you can see your top recommended artists already in your library, plus hints on new artists you might like. Requires an initial full scan to work, from Settings -> Media folders.
• Choice of album display in Home screen: either view it as a list of albums, or as a grid of album artwork (the classic Subsonic way). Configurable from Settings -> Personal.
• Corrected tags can now be chosen as personal aliases. For example, you can now correct the tag 60s to 1960s even if 1960s doesn't appear previously.
• Lyrics search should work better now, thanks to Sindre / upgrading that part of the code to the same as Subsonic 4.7 beta3.

If you're already using 0.7, you can just replace your subsonic.war with http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war and stop/start Subsonic.

Otherwise, install Java 7 and then use:
Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
Stand-alone version: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... dalone.zip

[hakko]

New release available - 0.7.10 with feature list:

• Last.fm group subscription. You can now subscribe to groups like this, and have it appear as one of your genres. You can browse artists that belong to the group, get recommendations on artists that are missing in your library, and generate playlists based on the artists of the group.
• Substring searching (actually introduced in 0.7.9). You can now search for "beatles yellow sub", and have relevant matches returned. The default Subsonic server wouldn't match anything (unless you explicitly added wildcards).
• Fix: searching now also works in mobile clients.
• Fix: font size for tag cloud now takes tag correction into account.

Note: Linux users may have to do something like sudo apt-get install postgresql-contrib (depending on package manager), as the substring search isn't included in the default PostgreSQL installation. Windows and Mac users don't need to take this extra step, as substring searching is included by default for them.

If you're already using 0.7, you can just replace your subsonic.war with http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war and stop/start Subsonic.

Otherwise, install Java 7 and then use:
Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
Stand-alone version: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... dalone.zip

[hakko]

New release available - 0.7.11 with feature list:

• MusicCabinet features are now available in mobile clients! (Tested on iSub)
• Use the Media Folder selector to choose a genre - this narrows the artist list to those matching selected genre.
• Use the Genre Radio menu option to get a playlist of popular songs, matching selected genre.
• When browsing an artist, choose Related Artists to bring up related artists from your library.
• When browsing an artist, choose Artist Radio to get a playlist of popular, related songs.
• Genre radio and Artist radio gets cached on iSub. To create another playlist, refresh by dragging upwards.
• Also includes some bug fixes by maxxh. Thanks!

If you're already using MusicCabinet 0.7, you can just replace your subsonic.war with http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war and stop/start Subsonic.

Otherwise, install Java 7 and then use:
Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
Stand-alone version: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... dalone.zip

[hakko]

New release available - 0.7.12.

This release contains a couple of "under the hood" changes that might affect your installation. Please report on the forum if you encounter any issues. It's safe to go back to 0.7.11 after trying, by using the two previous subsonic.war and .jar files.

Features added by maxxh (thanks!)

• JWPlayer 5.10 (enables HTML5 playback if Flash is not installed)
• Jetty upgraded from 6 to 8, with precompilation of JSPs for faster first page load
• Subsonic booter merged with upstream
• Use latest version for outdated Subsonic libraries

Features added by hakko

• Option to display composer in web interface (for classical music)
• Link to full album, for compilation albums in artist view
• Artist top tracks now available for mobile clients
• Expose artwork images (if multiple files exist) and videos in file tree browser
• Gzip html and trim jsp whitespace for faster page transfer
• Bug fix: better ordering of search results
• Bug fix: merged genres
• Bug fix: crash in NowPlaying view

This release contains changes in both subsonic.war and subsonic-booter.jar, so either download them from http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war and http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... encies.jar, and replace your current ones. Or use the bundles:

Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
Stand-alone version: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... dalone.zip

Discuss this release here: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10497

[hakko]

New release available - 0.7.13. Mostly bug fixes, but some news:

• Lyrics are no longer fetched from ChartLyrics.com. Instead, embedded lyrics are shown, and if not available, a search URL of your choice is used. (defaults to a Google search)
• Option in personal settings to sort albums alphabetically
• Option in general settings to use a custom URL for share links (if you have your own DNS)
• Media folder (genre) and years are now taken into account in App Shuffle
• Bug fix: a possible error when saving tags
• Bug fix: personal settings on Tomcat (make sure to remove old install completely before upgrading!)
• Bug fix: make removing media folders during scanning more robust
• Bug fix: artist link for songs in search result
• Bug fix: safer handling of shares with removed files
• Bug fix: don't display empty tag cloud
• Fix: updated old Subsonic libraries for easier build

The introduction of embedded lyrics brings up one problem: MusicCabinet hasn't earlier read this information, and is not aware of embedded lyrics in your already scanned files, if you happen to have that. To force a full scan of your library, you must delete and re-add appropriate media folders to have lyrics picked up. Alternatively, (since removing media folders is very slow), you could run this SQL command: update library.file set size = -1 and then force a scan of your library to have all files fully scanned again.

When adding lyrics to existing/new files, the media scanner will find them on subsequent scans. The problem only applies to files with lyrics that you've scanned before using version 0.7.13.

If you're already using MusicCabinet 0.7, you can just replace your subsonic.war with http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war and stop/start Subsonic.

Otherwise, install Java 7 and then use:
Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... -setup.exe
Non-Windows users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsoni ... dalone.zip
Tomcat users: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-tomcat.war

Please post further questions here: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10651