AmpJuke installation example

This example is from a real-life installation of AmpJuke version 0.8.3.

Let's start off with this situation:

- In this example, we assume your webserver is called www.my-ampjuke-server.org.

- The webserver's "doc_root" is set to /var/www (we assume you have the program files located in /var/www/ampjuke-0.8.3).

- Your music is stored in several folders starting from /music and beyond that directory.
Note that's outside the "doc_root" mentioned above.

- You have configured and full access to MySQL (that is: you have a username and -password that enables you to drop/create databases as well as tables).

 

AmpJuke installation. Step 1 of 9: Start off

Open your favorite browser and point it to: http://www.my-ampjuke-server.org/ampjuke-0.8.3

If all checks are OK, you should see this:

After you click on "Click here..", you will see this:



Continue by click on "Click here to continue".

AmpJuke installation. Step 2 of 9: Default configuration values

Warning:This is the tricky part of setting up AmpJuke (most errors are made here)!

Expand the first two sections by clicking on the small plus-sign ("+") next to them.
We're interested in "Database options" and "Location of program files & your music", so expand them.
Note: You can also change/inspect the configuration later.


The configuration page consists of sub-sections.
You'll find relevant links in most of the sections. The links points to specific entried in the AmpJuke FAQ.

"Database host" is normally localhost so we'll leave it as it is.

"Database user" is the name of a MySQL-user on your box that has access to creating databases/tables. In this example we'll use root (normally not the case, but check your own MySQL-settings).

"Database users password" is the password for the MySQL-user entered above. At least you should know yourself what password you use to connect to MySQL...

"Database name" can be any name that AmpJuke will use as database. We will use ampjukeDB

Since we are installing for the first time, we should check "Create an empty database" and "Create empty tables...".
IMPORTANT: Be 100% sure that you're not deleting an existing database by accident!!
"Prefix tablenames" can be any (valid) sequence of characters you want to add as a prefix to the tables in the AmpJuke installation.
The default is ampjuke_


Location of program files & your music
"Base directory..." is where your music is stored. Remember that we in this example use /music ?
Note: Music can be placed anywhere on the local filesystem

"HTTP-location..." by default points to the directory where you put the AmpJuke-files, so leave it as it is (which is normal).

The rest of the configuration parameters can either be set now, or you can inspect/change it later by logging in as a user with administrator access and click "Configuration..." on the 'Welcome' page.

AmpJuke installation. Step 3 of 9: A completed configuration

Check that everything is correct, and then click "Save & Continue".

AmpJuke installation. Step 4 of 9: Saved configuration

A confirmation message is displayed if everything is ok.
Please take a look at the Special notes section at the bottom.

Click on "Click here to login" to proceed...

AmpJuke installation. Step 5 of 9: First login

First time you login, the default username and password for AmpJuke is admin and pass:

AmpJuke installation. Step 6 of 9: The "welcome" page

The default "Welcome" page is displayed:

...pretty "empty", since we dont have any music imported, yet.

On to the next step: import music...
Click on Scan music... in the menu.

AmpJuke installation. Step 7 of 9: Choose how/what to scan+import

This FAQ-entry explains in details what is possible when you want to scan your music collection, - and yes: there are many options.


However, we're in a hurry to finish this task, so simply click: Start scan+import", to get started with scan+import of tags from your music to the database.

AmpJuke installation. Step 8 of 9: Scanning and importing tags from the musicfiles into AmpJuke

Be patient. Be very, very patient !
Especially if you have a relatively large music-collection (15k+ tracks), is on a slow server (less than 2GHz) and/or have memory-issues (less than 1GB), or any combination of these three factors.

If you have terminal access, you might try and open one and run the "top" command (or "atop" if you have it installed, or any other performance tool you prefer), and you will see there's really something going on...
As an alternative, you could have set "Show details during scan+import" to a different level - however that is NOT recommended the very first time you run a scan+import...too much stuff will be written to the screen if you do that the first time you run scan+import (example below, where I - by "accident" switched to "Normal" in the "detail" option on the previous screen).


Once finished, you will see a message stating how long the process took (in seconds):

...as well as a Click here to continue link (also note the link to the report: sh*tloads of useful stuff in there...), - and once you do that...

AmpJuke installation. Step 9 of 9: Done !

Well done ! You did it !
AmpJuke is installed, music is imported, and you can start to listen to some music !

This brings us to the end of this installation example. Hope it helped you out, if you had issues during installation !

After a while (or perhaps right after installation), you might want to customize your AmpJuke installation.

The FAQ contains lots of information about that, for example:
- Enable "on-the-fly" auto-download covers for albums: http://www.ampjuke.org/?id=faq74...
...and/or auto-download album covers and images of artists/performers for the entire collection: http://www.ampjuke.org/?id=faq77.

- Enable the built-in flash player: http://www.ampjuke.org/?id=faq73.
- Show what's playing in a small area in the browser (AJAX stuff): http://www.ampjuke.org/id=faq42.
- Send listening statistics to your last.fm profile (or each user's own profile): http://www.ampjuke.org/?id=faq51.
- Automatically retrieve, store and display biographies for albums and performers: http://www.ampjuke.org/?id=faq57.
...and much, much more...

So...why not download AmpJuke and give it a spin on your own box ?

22-08-2010