A Blog for Anuj

I’m trying out Jinzora as a better alternative to ampache. Most of the setup was very easy, as Jinzora2 uses a web based installer. There were a few things i had to do to make it work 100%, which i will talk about later.

Major installation steps (with points of caution included)

• Get the package. I’m using Jinzora 2.7.5 Obsidian
• Extract the package files. Move the extracted dir to your web dir (/var/www)
• IMPORTANT:
  1. Make sure the installation dir (in my case ‘jinzora2’) is owned by same user which is used to run your web server.
  2. Run the provided configure.sh script which sets up required file permissions.

   # on debian based systems
   sudo chown -R www-data:www-data jinzora2

• Point you web browser to the installation dir. In my case, I have set the docroot for the subdomain to be the installation dir. After this simply follow the web based wizard which sets up admin account, database tables and imports your media.

• Delete the ‘install’ sub directory as prompted by jinzaro.

Jinzaro is up and running ….

Important Configuration

• Album Art: In case your album art is not showing up, make sure that you have GD2 library installed for php. Its just a matter of apt-get install php5-gd, restarting apache and album arts should show just fine.
• Downsampling:
  1. Go to Admin tools -> System Tools -> Settings Manager -> Main Setting -> Resampling
  2. Make sure path to lame binary is correct. If you have not installed lame yet, please do so now. I had to fix paths to lame and other binaries, as in debian based systems, lame is located at /usr/bin/lame
  3. Set the default resampling rate. I prefer 44kbps personally
  4. Note: Jinzaro has a clever $no_resample_subnets variable in settings.php which tell jinzaro not to resample for local requests.
• Embedded Players:
  • For music streaming, i chose fsmp3 player. Its has the cleanest interface while still being the one with most options.
  • For video streaming, has to be qt player. Streaming video is pretty good with no jerks or buffer stops.

Have fun ….

I’ve had an urge to setup my own media server at home for a long time now. The idea is that, I wanna be able to listen to and share my humongous music collection anywhere.

My first attempt was to set up Ampache. It worked well for starters, web based installation was breeze and most things worked ‘out of the box’. What Ampache lacked was

• A good choice of embedded external players
• Inability to stream video content
• Down sampling music content ‘on-the-fly’ didn’t work.

Not being able to downsample was a big bummer, because if I don’t downsample music, I’ll eat up my bandwidth in 1 day! Of course there are ways to get it going; edit setting files and configuring command line options for lame yourself etc. All I had to do, was to hand-edit the config/ampache.cfg.php file and uncomment some settings for enabling down sampling. Now why would the ampache team make user edit the settings like this for a web-application?

I’m giving up on ampache after 2 months and moving on to other options, most probably Jinzora. Jinzora offers all that amapche lacks, while still having all functionality of amapche.

At the time of writing this post, Ampache team has released a new version which is complete rewrite to php5 and other features, but they still have lots to catch upto Jinzora.

To be or not to be.

—Shakespeare

To do is to be.

—Nietzsche

To be is to do.

—Sartre

Do be do be do.

—Sinatra

......says wanda the fish