Introducing Blofeld
July 22nd, 2010I’m happy to announce the initial “release” of a project I’ve been working on for quite some time now: Blofeld.
What is Blofeld?
In short, Blofeld is a music server. You install it on a Linux PC and tell it where your music is, and it provides a web interface that allows you to listen to that music almost anywhere you have internet access and a web browser. Blofeld is fairly similar to applications like Jinzora, Subsonic or Ampache.
So, why not use one of those apps you just mentioned?
There are a few reasons I decided to write Blofeld. First of all, I really just wanted a project to work on and an excuse to learn some interesting technology. Additionally, I found most of the existing options to be severely lacking in a few areas. Particularly, I find that they’re…
- Very slow to import/update the library
- Difficult to install and configure
- Too complicated (have you seen some of the transcoding or ACL stuff?)
- Invasive (e.g., modifying tags or adding images to the music folder)
- Generally clunky and just not very friendly
Features
Blofeld is a very young project, but it still has a fairly respectable set of features. Currently it supports:
- Automatic on-the-fly transcoding
- Extremely fast library import/update
- Cover art (including embedded art)
- Nearly any audio container and codec
- A modern, friendly web interface
- Themes
- Song downloads (in a zip file, with artwork)
- Basic users, groups and permissions
- JSON based API
What does it look like?
Blofeld is completely themeable, but here are a few screenshots of the default theme.
How do I get it?
If you’re using Ubuntu, you can install Blofeld from my PPA. You can do that by running these commands in a terminal:
# Add the PPA to your Software Sources
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dwhayes/ppa
# Update the package list
sudo aptitude update
# Install the package
sudo aptitude install blofeld
Once you have it installed, you should be able to just run blofeld at the terminal and a configuration file will be created for you at ~/blofeld/blofeld.cfg. Edit it using your favorite text editor (you probably only need to change the path option, which should point to the folder that contains your music).
Run blofeld on the terminal again to start the application. Blofeld will immediately start scanning your music into its library. Point your web browser to http://localhost:8083 and you should be greeted with the web interface. You can stop Blofeld by hitting ctrl+c on your keyboard in the terminal where you started the program.
If you would prefer to have Blofeld run as a system service (i.e., start up when you turn your computer on and run in the background), then you’ll need to edit /etc/default/blofeld and set ENABLE_DAEMON=true and then run sudo start blofeld. This will create a configuration file at /etc/blofeld/blofeld.cfg which you need to edit (again, be sure and set the path to your music directory). Run sudo start blofeld again to actually start the application, and Blofeld will start automatically when your computer boots up from now on.
If you’re not using Ubuntu, then download the latest release and follow the instructions in the README file.
What’s with the stupid name?
Blofeld is named for the Bond villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. I have no idea why.
