Installation

Partyzone allows one to syncronise music across a number of devices.

It consists of a player which is installed on a device with a amplifier / speaker. You can have a number of players on one device. For example I have a netbook with four usb soundcards plugged into a usb hub. The output of these then each go to a cheap ebay amplifier and then speaker.

There are systemd files in the source that start all the parts but here I will describe running manually.

First as the system is built on pyro4 so we first run the pyro4 nameserver.

/usr/bin/python /usr/local/bin/pyro4-ns -n 0.0.0.0

the -n 0.0.0.0 makes the nameserver availiable over the network.

All the players have to sync their audio with a network clock. To start that clock we need to run

/opt/PartyZone/netclock.py --host 192.168.1.6

--host is the ip of the system you run the clock from.

Now we can start the player (one of many)

/opt/PartyZone/partyzone --player --name "Kitchen" --host 192.168.1.9 --card hw:2,0

This would start a player on a device with ip 192.168.1.9. --card hw:2,0 tells the player which alsa device to use. the --name parameter is used by the web frontend.

Web Frontend Installation

the webfrontend uses a Beets music library to play to the players.

Beets plugin

Within the beetsplug directory is a beets plugin and web frontend written in Aurelia.
http://beets.io/ is a Python music indexer / metadata system.
I created a beets plugin called partyzone that helps send the music to the players.

To run this plugin
Add the plugin directory to the Python path
ie  export PYTHONPATH="${PYTHONPATH}:/opt/PartyZone"

Edit the beets config file

vim ~/.config/beets/config.yaml

Add the following

directory: /home/media/music
library: ~/musiclibrary.blb

plugins: partyzone

partyzone:
    host: 192.168.1.6
    port: 5000


Once the config is save you have to index your music

For importing read https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/v1.3.17/guides/main.html

I used
beet import -A /media/External/Music

Once index simply run my plugin

beet partyzone --debug

This will start a webserver you can access on port 5000

You must then build the Aurelia web frontend.

Ie

cd beetsplug/web/; webpack

You must serve the files created in beetsplug/web/dist

The webpages look like below.