The Temple of Bague

We’re very pleased with ourselves. Last night was the Livingston and Broxburn Brass Band’s christmas concert and the whole lot of us were playing! And we weren’t awful! So, nerves shot to hell, the panic is just starting to subside (panic, I might add, caused by hearing just how amazing the senior band are) and I’m looking forward to going back to learning at a sedate pace instead of worrying about performing.

I’m sure we’ll be more relaxed the next time.

Just when the jingly-jangly boyband-poptastic misery of Christmas was getting into it’s sticky-sweet candied frenzy, an amazing discovery has been made! The Crash Test Dummies made an album of Christmas Carols and I never knew! It’s a collection of all the traditional christmas standards and it’s completely awesome! From now on, my Christmas listening habits will be directed very much in the direction of Brad Roberts’ funereal sonorous drawl.

I am a very happy bunny.

Ok, so here’s the problem:

1. I have a decrepit old PC that I need to find a job for or it’s destined to sit on a scrapheap biodegrading over the next 10,000 years.
2. We don’t have room to have all our CDs anywhere near handy so have to listen to our music on the computer speakers.
3. We have a very good and very expensive hi-fi seperates system going to waste.

Here are contributing issues:

1. Despite having a nice hi-fi, we’re not too bothered about the loss of quality of playing stuff via MP3 because we rarely get a chance to actually sit and listen these days - it’s generally background.
2. We don’t like have cables stretched across the room and the PC is too far from the hi-fi to have a cable run.

So here’s the solution.

First of all, nab a copy of Ubuntu Server from http://www.ubuntu.com. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian and is free software.

Next, we need to stick in a big enough disk to hold all the MP3s. In our case, I put in two disks in a RAID1 (mirrored) configuration cos I really don’t want to have to rip all those CDs again if we lose the disk.

Now then - time to get the “server” out of the middle of the living room before my lovely wife batters me - it’s duly lugged behind the TV unit (where the hi-fi is) and the sound output connected to the amplifier. Also, this particular machine has a USB wifi dongle plugged in (Thanks Dad!) so there’s no need for trailing network cables.

So, boot it up and off it goes. When installing Ubuntu, I told it I wanted a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) machine - it’s easy enough to set up normally, but Ubuntu does it all for you. I also installed openssh-server so I can actually log in to the thing.

Next thing I need are a couple of extra pieces of software:

1. GD PHP extensions - for manipulating images from PHP scripts.
2. MPD - the music player daemon. This little wonder sits on a network port and waits to be told what to play.
3. MPDscribble - an optional one this, but it basically submits everything played by MPD to my Last.FM profile, so you can see it listed on the right of this site.
4. Some extra codecs - Ubuntu, by default, doesn’t provide support for restricted formats like MP3. As it happens, I wanted to check that the audio was all working so installed mp3blaster - that pulled in all the restricted modules as dependencies so I  didn’t have to specify them manually. I also needed a mixer program to make sure the volumes were set properly.

The following terminal command does all that:

sudo apt-get install php5-gd mpd mpdscribble mp3blaster rexima

Grind crunch grind all done. First of all I ran rexima to set the mixer volumes. ACE.

Now then - time to get some music on it. I scp’d my MP3 files to /home/jmd/music. MPD, by default (on Ubuntu at least) looks in /var/lib/mpd/music for music files. I have the choice of either changing /etc/mpd.conf to point to /home/jmd/music or replace /var/lib/mpd/music with a symlink back to /home/jmd/music. I did the latter cos it’s a bit neater. Then I made sure that /home/jmd/music was readable by the apache user. One restart of mpd later and it can find all my music. ACE.

Now then - how will I control the thing remotely? The answer is via a web browser. Remember we told Ubuntu to set up a LAMP server? Well, it was off to http://www.jinzora.org to download the latest release. Jinzora is a full-featured web based jukebox which, as well as providing an interface to a local mpd instance, can also stream music from the server over the internet. I’m not interested in the streaming part (although it might be useful for listening to The Goons in my bed via my wireless Ubuntu laptop :)), just the mpd jukebox part.

So, download Jinzora, untar it and copy the contents to /var/www, followed by a quick chown www-user:www-user of the files so it can modify itself, and then follow the instructions.

The result - I can play, update, organise and manage our music collection via a web browser and it plays back via the hi-fi. ACE.

I’ve done this kind of set up before so it took my literally 15 minutes (excluding the time taken to copy 40Gb of MP3s over the network) to set up - I reckon a first time user could do it in less than an hour.

Now begins the tweaking!

Or that’s how it seemed. After what seems like an eternity of listening to music on mp3 players and laptops, we finally got our nice shiny hifi set up last night. Between the big chunky toroid transformers and the fairy-dust powered magical crossover in Linn speakers, we dragged Nina off the surface of the disc and planted her in the middle of the room to sing for us.

And lovely it was.

I don’t, as a rule, blog about music because I listen to so much of it that I’d never get anything else done. This album, though, warrants an entry for its sheer ACENESS. I find that I get so used to bands being unable to match their over-produced studio efforts on the stage that I tend to not blink an eye at a really bad performance. The excuses; “well, they’ve probably been on the road for six months” or “they probably have a really bad sound engineer” spring to mind.

This album is proof if proof were needed that a lot of bands out there need to get their act together and stop relying on studio trickery to improve their sound. Rhapsody rattle through a dozen or so of very difficult, very complex songs without a missed beat or bum note. The frontman’s ability to wind the audience into a frenzy and the little detours the music make provide that a Rhapsody concert is much more than a bunch of guys running through the tracks on the album.

Even if you don’t particularly like neo-classical modern prog metal, this album is well worth a listen just to see how live music should be done.