Play is your company's dj.
We want to play music at our office. Everyone has their own library on their own machines, and everyone except for me plays shitty music. Play is designed to make office music more palatable.
Play is api-driven and web-driven. All music is dropped on a central Mac system. Once it's available to Play, users can control what's being played. Users can either use a nice web view or the API, which lends itself for use on the command line or through Campfire.
Play will play all the songs that are added to its Queue. Play will play the crap out of that Queue. And you know what? If there's nothing left in the Queue, Play will figure out who's in the office and play something that they'll like.
No shit.
The underlying tech of Play uses afplay to control music (for now), so you'll
need a Mac. afplay is just a simple command-line wrapper to OS X's underlying
music libraries, so it should come preinstalled with your Mac, and it should
play anything iTunes can play.
Play also expects MySQL to be installed.
Play itself is installed with a gem.
gem install play
You'll need to set up your configuration values, which we store in
~/.play.yml. You can view the example file on
GitHub.
This is a bit of a pain that we'll correct eventually. For now, create your
MySQL database by hand. We expect the database to be called play, but it's
really pulled from whatever you have in ~/.play.yml. When that's set up, run:
bin/play --migrate
Next, go to GitHub and register a new OAuth
application. Users sign in with
their GitHub account. Copy the Client ID and Client Secret into Play's
~/.play.yml file.
Next, tell Play where to look for music. It's the path attribute in
~/.play.yml. We'll then look at your path and import everything
recursively when you run:
play -i
Once you're all set up, you can spin up the web app with:
play -w
You can hit the server at localhost:5050. Queue some hawt, hawt music up. We'll wait.
Ready? Cool. The only thing left to do is actually start the music server. That's done with:
play -d
You'll detach it and put it in the background, where it will sit waiting for salacious music to play for you. When you want to kill it for reals, run:
play -s
For all the fun commands and stuff you can do, just run:
play -h
This isn't a required step. If nothing's in the queue and Play has still been told to play something, it'll just play random music. But you can set it up so it will play a suitable artist for someone who's currently in the office.
That particular step is left to the reader's imagination — here at GitHub we
poll our router's ARP tables and update an internal application with MAC
addresses — but all Play cares about is a URL that returns comma-separated
string identifiers. We get that string by hitting the office_url in
~/.play.yml. The string that's returned from that URL should look
something like this:
holman,kneath,defunkt
That means those three handsome lads are in the office right now. Once we get
that, we'll compare each of those with the users we have in our database. We do
that by checking a user attribute called office_string, which is just a
unique identifier to associate back to Play's user accounts. In this example,
I'd log into my account and change my office_string to be "holman" so I could
match up. It could be anything, though; we actually use MAC addresses here.
Play has a full API that you can use to do tons of fun stuff. In fact, the API is more feature-packed than the web UI. Because we're programmers. And baller.
Check out the API docs on the wiki.
If you're going to hack on this locally, you can use the normal process for
writing a Sintara app (rackup, shotgun, et cetera). The only thing we kind
of do differently in Play is we disable the GitHub OAuth callback (since your
development URL is different than it would be in production).
To actually use it locally, we'll automatically create a user called user for
you when you first access the app. That way you can actually mess around
without having to hit GitHub or create a user manually.
None of this happens if you launch Play with bin/play -d.
This is pretty rough. For the most part it should run pretty reliably for you, but there's a bit of setup and configuration that I'd like to refine and do away with until it's "ready" for prime time.
Once it's ready, pretty sure I'm going to make the most awesome screencast, and then it's balls-out from there.
This was created by Zach Holman. You can follow me on Twitter as @holman.
I usually find myself playing Justice, Kanye West, and Muse at the office.