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Welcome to MP3-CMS Wiki!
This documentation wiki has been established to allow the MP3-CMS community to share in the installation documentation in order to provide new users the quickest, most reliable way to get up to speed and use the CMS server as effectively as possible.

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Introduction

MP3-CMS is a server based music management system. It provides a clean user interface for cataloging and listening to your music from a web browser. It exists solely because I could not find a web based player with the features I wanted that worked the way I wanted it to work. The system is composed of 2 components: a web site and a scanner. The scanner application is embedded in the web site and runs concurrently. The scanner identifies the path it should scan from the site's configuration files and it runs in the background behind the scenes and watches the path for changes. As you go about your business adding new mp3s or deleting them, the scanner will automatically detect this activity and update the embedded Sqlite database accordingly. It's important to understand that the only thing you need to run the CMS is some mp3 files and a Windows server running ASP.NET v2.0.

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Setup

Setup is pretty simple in the latest release v1.5.0.3; consisting of setting the path to your database, the path to your music, and setting permissions for the website to access both of these directories.



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Configure Your Collection

Before you start the installation it's highly recommended that you do some pre-requisite work on your collection to ensure that your music files are properly tagged. It you choose to skip this step it's entirely possible that you will end up with a situation where you have the same artist or genre separated. For example, you could easily end up with a situation like this:

• AC/DC
• AC-DC
• ACDC
• ac/dc

With AC/DC appearing as 4 different artists. The same holds true with albums and genres. You certainly don't want different genres for Pop and pop or Rap and Hip-Hop, or Rock and Alt.Rock.

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Folder Heirarchy

For optimum performance we recommend that you use the following convention to establish your collection.


Genre\Artist\Album\*.mp3
Classical\Beethovan\Classical Masters\Fur Elize.mp3



At the very least please ensure that albums are contained in their own folder.

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ID3 Tags

ID3 Tags are metadata containers embedded in mp3 music files that describe the file. This is how applications determine what the song title is, the artist, album, etc. If you have not ever modified your ID3Tags then chances are that many of them are incorrect. If you want the full MP3-CMS experience then you'll want to follow these ID3Tag Guidelines:

• Validate that all Artists match correctly. (AC/DC is not the same as Ac/dc)
• Decide on a limited number of genres and place all tracks in these genres
• If a CD has more than one artist then set the Band tag to Various Artists
• Separate large Albums into smaller ones. Do let any CD contain more than 25 tracks

At the minimum every track in the collection must have these tags:

• Artist
• Album
• Title
• Genre

I recommend MP3Tag to manage ID3Tags. It's free and excellent, allowing for batch tagging and tagging based on filename (a real time-saver). In addition it runs under WINE in linux which is a huge plus. Please do not continue the installation without checking your collection for proper tags.

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Album Art

CD Cover art is critical to user satisfaction and we highly recommend that you spend some time before the installation obtaining Album art for each album in your collection. You have 2 options when it comes to art:

1. Name the cover image folder.jpg and place it in the root of the album's folder
2. Use a ID3Tag program to embed the cover art into each file in the collection

Either of these 2 options will result in your CD cover art being displayed properly. There are a lot of places to locate cover art but the best is by far, SlothRadio. If no cover art is found in the album's folder or embedded in the file then the scanner will display the no_cover.gif file from the images directory in it's place.

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Installation

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Configure ASP.NET Application

Unzip the website you downloaded from nealosis.com or sourceforge.net and copy it to your server. Usually this is c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\music. You'll need to create the music folder of course.

The system configuration files are located in the path ~/config/my_settings/ and the 2 files you need to edit are AppSettings.xml and NHibernate.xml.

1. AppSettings.xml: Edit the ScanPath key. Set it to your root music path
2. NHibernate.config: In the Sqlite section edit the connection.connectionstring property. Set this to the physical location where you want the sqlite database to be created.

In addition, you need to give the application rights to read your collection and edit the database. Grant the NETWORK_SERVICE account Read & Execute, Write, and Modify permissions to the ~/App_Data folder. You can access the permissions (ACL) by right clicking on the App_Data folder and selecting the Security tab.



Finally, grant the NETWORK_SERVICE account Read & Execute and List permissions to your ScanPath folder (so the application can scan your music).

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Configure IIS Server

We're assuming that you have an Internet Information Server Available. These steps may not be different if using the free Cassini Web Server.

Please be sure you have installed the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Extensions before proceeding.

Open the Internet Services Manager applet and navigate to Default Web Site. Right click on this node and select New > Virtual Directory.

Virtual Directory Wizard Settings

• Alias: Music
• Path: c:\inetpub\wwwroot\music (your installation path)
• Access Permissions: Read, Run Scripts, Execute, Write

Right click on the newly created virtual directory and select Properties. In the properties sheet open the documents tab. If there is no file called default.aspx then add it in the list. In the ASP.NET tab ensure that the version selected is 2.0.50727

Modify the Timeout Settings for the AppPool
Open the Internet Service Manager applet and expand the Application Pools folder. Right click the DefaultAppPool item and select properties. In the Performance tab there is an Idle Timeout section. Uncheck the only option in this section to disable timeouts. This step will allow the scanner to run all the time and not timeout (which causes all kinds of trouble for us).

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Running the Site

If you've properly set everything up then you can now open your web browser and connect to the MP3-CMS. http://YourServer/music/

When you connect you'll need to create an account. After you create an account the scanner will kickoff in the background and start scanning your collection. Feel free to browse the site and enjoy it's features while the scanner is running.