pour l'amour de la musique

My newest obsession has to be Ampache. Shortly after I upgraded my hosting plan to "unlimited" I decided to use the storage to back-up my digital life (in case of fire/flood/toddler toilette experiments/etc). Since then, I have uploaded approx. 40 GB of media, most of which is home videos and music. I must admit I don't have a very impressive music library compared to many-a-cohort. Still, I always wondered if I could easily manage this lot with a web utility so I didn't always have to carry my external hard-drive around or copy my library whenever I get a new computer. I also like the idea of having it centralized since I'm not too good at keeping up on redundancy with media coming into possession using one of two laptops, home and work desktops, friends, and so on.

Introducing Ampache. Ampache has a lot of functionality that I am not able to exploit, designed for a server that you have total control over, which is not the case with my shared hosting service. However, I have successfully uploaded the PHP based installer, created a database, and configured it...and I'm not that smart so it has to be easy! The only problem that I haven't yet solved is increasing the maximum time my server will allow an Ampache PHP script to run. The default is set to 30 s, which is really not enough to catalog my entire library. My current work-around is to break the library up into many catalogs.

Nevertheless, I am happy with the user interface which allows me to either download a playlist .m3u file which then lets a media player (I use VLC) to stream from the web-server, or there is also a local flashplayer (xspf). I would prefer to use the xspf player since it is one click playback and has a nice interface which displays album art, however, lots of my music is in .ogg format which won't play. So I'm working on converting to .mp3s.

Download Buttons and Better xspf player

I wanted to know how can I have a "cyber-button" that upon clicking will get your browser to start a download from my server. Here were some useful answers to start:

How to Create an HTML Download Link

Self Extracting Zip File (1) (2)

I also found a website that used a xspf player that included a "shuffle" feature. I thought this was neat and had to have it! I found one with instructions here and here, extracted and uploaded the .fla, .as, and .swf files and presto-blamo it worked.

ChemToolBox.com Agora Forum Troubleshooting

Uploaded Agora Forum for Joomla! 1.5 but having some problems.  Seems that Agora is coded in PHP5 and my server host is configured for PHP4.  When trying to post to the forum the following message appears:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or '}' in /home/content/r/p/k/rpkopreski/html/CHEMTOOLBOX/components/com_agora/helpers/emailprocessor.php on line 5

I had originally a similar error even dealing with syncing to my user list with Agora and found a solution on the agora forum.  However, it appears there are going to be a slew of problems associated with forcing Agora to play nice with PHP4 so I called GoDaddy and found I can change my server to run PHP5 by going to:

Hosting Manager --> Content --> Add On Languages

However, this may destroy every damn Joomla! site I am currently hosting.  And I'm not sure yet how it will play out so I need to track this carefully.  Takes up to 24hrs to propagate on the server so more to come....

Okay, that was fast!  So far it looks like the posting problem is instantly fixed!  Of course this may have broken something else somewhere, but I will have to wait and see!