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Audioserve: Simple personal server to serve audio files from directories

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Re: Audioserve: Simple personal server to serve audio files from directories

#3
I think the secret sauce of network based audio server is streaming and whatever bag of tricks to smooth out perceived latency and fault tolerance. This can also mean pairing it with a nice client.

I mean, you can just serve mp3 files over HTTP. The browser can download the whole file, and load it until whatever mp3 playing library there is.

This is exactly what I did for my first personal project that landed me an internship at FANG. My music player had a pretty nice UI at the time ( Yahoo music days ), but music players from professionals like Yahoo or Spotify ( web player released one year later ) is that they are resilient to network failure, rather than assuming the mp3 file downloaded it one go, that it would be fast, and you can just point your JavaScript library at it, now that it's cached by the browser and can be loaded into memory.

Re: Audioserve: Simple personal server to serve audio files from directories

#4
post #3

I think the secret sauce of network based audio server is streaming and whatever bag of tricks to smooth out perceived latency and fault tolerance. This can also mean pairing it with a nice client. I mean, you can just serve mp3 files over HTTP. The browser can download the whole file, and load it until whatever mp3 playing library there is. This is exactly what I did for my first personal project that landed me an i…

> I mean, you can just serve mp3 files over HTTP. The browser can download the whole file, and load it until whatever mp3 playing library there is

If you have the right container/encoding format (my experience is that it works well with mkv) you can even start watching a video file locally with VLC while wget is still downloading it via HTTP... works amazingly well.

Re: Audioserve: Simple personal server to serve audio files from directories

#6
If you need something even more simple, a no-configuration audio streaming server is here: github.com/fgergo/boringstreamer

I wrote boringstreamer to listen to my collection. I start one or more instances on different ports in different directories and connect to different ports similar to fm radio frequencies. (With tailscale I can listen from anywhere without any explicit access control.)

Re: Audioserve: Simple personal server to serve audio files from directories

#7
post #3

I think the secret sauce of network based audio server is streaming and whatever bag of tricks to smooth out perceived latency and fault tolerance. This can also mean pairing it with a nice client. I mean, you can just serve mp3 files over HTTP. The browser can download the whole file, and load it until whatever mp3 playing library there is. This is exactly what I did for my first personal project that landed me an i…

You don't even need to wait for the download to finish, the browser can stream it directly

Re: Audioserve: Simple personal server to serve audio files from directories

#8
I like this. Might be a good contender for audiobookshelf. I like the simple design, I like the low level language. Only downside is low number of contributors but I've looked at the author and they look like a real decent person. They have a history of contributing to open source, which is a good sign.

Re: Audioserve: Simple personal server to serve audio files from directories

#9
This is really cool. Simple media servers are I think are where it's at. I know lots of people like applications to handle managing their media (a la iTunes) but I really prefer this type of organization method myself...it let me be a lot sloppier with the media metadata while still being able to find stuff in large collections.

Being entirely selfish, I do wish audio servers would focus a bit more on what kind of audio they can serve up. Something with robust support for tracker (mod, s3m, xm, it, mtm, 669, etc), chip (most old 8-bit PCs), and game music formats (SNES, Genesis/MD, etc.) for old systems would be amazing and something I've long looked for as it would instantly open up millions of songs without requiring several terabytes of storage. Many libraries like FFmpeg support many of those internally, but software build on those libraries simply don't expose it.

Re: Audioserve: Simple personal server to serve audio files from directories

#10
post #9

This is really cool. Simple media servers are I think are where it's at. I know lots of people like applications to handle managing their media (a la iTunes) but I really prefer this type of organization method myself...it let me be a lot sloppier with the media metadata while still being able to find stuff in large collections. Being entirely selfish, I do wish audio servers would focus a bit more on what kind of au…

If you've sorted that much out, you could probably make the PR, right?

Might even be able to take in funds for doing so.

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