This is the README for Shrill, a GPLed jukebox written in Perl. It is a frontend for the great digital audio jukebox server Mserv (www.mserv.org).

INTRODUCTION

Shrill is designed to operate like one of the computerized jukeboxes that you might find at a bar these days. It is designed to run fullscreen and has a rather limited, but intuitive feature set: you just scroll around, pick an album, pick a track, and it gets queued. Thanks to Mserv, the jukebox will automatically go into random play mode when nothing is queued.

I personally use this on my HTPC (which otherwise runs MythTV) and operate it by remote; for parties I can just leave it running and let others control the soundtrack.

You can get the latest copy of this program at: http://bobcopeland.com/shrill/

CREDITS

Thanks to Alon K. for the "no art" image. Bob Copeland ([email protected]) had something to do with the rest of this.

INSTALL

For the most part, just run "perl Makefile.PL && make install".
Look in the INSTALL file for complete installation directions.

CONFIGURING SHRILL

Configuration parameters are described in the comments of the sample.config. This file should be copied to ~/.shrill/config and edited to suit. In particular, you must supply the connection parameters and login credentials for Mserv, and the path to your music collection.

If you would like to use a different keyboard layout, you can get a list of available keys by running:

$ perl -MGtk2::Gdk::Keysyms -e 'print join("\n", sort keys (%Gtk2::Gdk::Keysyms));'

Shrill uses Gtk's built-in component traversal (up/down/left/right/tab) for moving around the album interface.

You can do a certain amount of UI configuration by editing the gtkrc or the glade files. Because those are likely installed in a system path, you can make copies of them and then override the appropriate lines in the config file. This is, for example, the only way at present to set the font size or the initial screen size.

CONFIGURING MSERV

Consult the Mserv documentation for particulars. One thing to be aware of is that mserv requires you to name albums once you start it up (or they will show up as "!-Unindexed"). After you do this be sure to run 'sync' so that the metadata gets written to disk (otherwise shrill will not be able to see it), and then run 'reset' so that the albums will be reordered in alphabetical order (or else the album names will not match up with the tracks). See the Troubleshooting section for more information.

Also, if large parts of your collection are in Ogg Vorbis, you may want to take a look at ogg_meta.pl, contained in the tools directory. I wrote this to quickly load all of my albums using the vorbiscomment data. It certainly saved a lot of time manually entering track titles and album names.

GETTING ALBUM ART

Shrill is pretty useless without album art for each album. And alas, it contains no magic to get the album art either. There are, however, existing utilities to do this for you in a batch process. Try this:

http://kempele.fi/~skyostil/projects/albumart/

Once you have downloaded the album covers, run shrill and make sure the images are correct. Sometimes, a tool will download 1x1 gifs or the wrong album cover. Shrill will always pick the largest image file in the directory (by file size), so keep this in mind.

TROUBLESHOOTING

Here are a few gotchas that you may encounter using Shrill. If you experience a problem, using a different mserv client (or telnetting directly to the mserv port) might narrow down where to look.

• I run the application and it tells me "No albums found!".

First, make sure you added some music to mserv in the first place. Next check your music directory set in ~/.shrill/config. If this is set correctly, verify that both the mserv_meta_dir and music_dir match up to the corresponding configurations for Mserv. Try 'locate mservtrackinfo' for example to find the mserv_meta_dir.

• The albums are in the wrong order. When I select an album it shows the tracks for something else.

By far the most common annoyance in the system is that Mserv and Shrill can get out of sync. This can happen when you add new music to your directory that Mserv doesn't know about. Because Shrill fiddles around with Mserv's metadata behind its back, there is ample opportunity for things to get messed up -- for the albums in the interface to not match the track list.

Shrill uses (or tries to use) the same album numbering system as Mserv.
However it doesn't know when you update Mserv's state (e.g. by running the sync command to rename an album). Therefore to add new music, a hopefully infrequent process, be sure to follow these steps in order:

1. If applicable, create the new metadata files on disc by running ogg_meta.pl.
2. Make certain all the directories in Mserv's 'mservtrackinfo' directory are writeable by the Mserv process.
3. Telnet to the server and type 'sync' to cause Mserv to read/generate metadata for new music. IMPORTANT: make sure Mserv has write access to its metadata directory or else it will make the changes in memory but not on disk.
4. While connected to the server type 'reset'. This will cause Mserv to renumber the albums in sorted order instead of their earlier ordering.

In general, try the sync/reset sequence, and restart Shrill to get them on the same page.

• Even though I have an image, I still get the no-art image.

Your image may be a format that GDK doesn't understand, or GDK is otherwise unable to open it. Shrill catches any exceptions thrown and tries the no-art image in such cases. I have seen one instance where high ascii characters in the directory name caused GDK to crap out. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future version of the Gtk2 bindings.

• It doesn't look like the screenshot. The buttons are all wack.

If you use a gtk theme that uses engines for button borders and so forth, the image buttons may look strange. I don't know how to override all of this stuff in a gtkrc, so if anyone has pointers send them my way.

• It takes a long, long time to start up

Yeah, I know. It has to traverse a ton of directories at startup if you have a sizeable music collection. I may address this in a future version.