scmpc - (Another) Audioscrobbler client for MPD

Maedhros · Last edited by Maedhros on Sat Dec 02, 2006 9:26 pm; edited 4 times in total

This is a project I've been working on (off and on) for about a year, but it's finally got to a stage where it looks like it might be suitable for release to the general public. I'm now looking for testers.

I know there are already a few clients out there, but none of them did quite what I wanted. At the time I started writing scmpc, mpdscribble hadn't been written yet, and I picked this as a project to teach myself C programming, mainly. Still, I haven't found a client that has all these features at once:

scmpc can run as a daemon - it doesn't need to be backgrounded by the shell.
It works with crossfading enabled.
It's robust in terms of network connections - it'll keep running even if it can't connect to anything, and it will keep trying to reconnect except in a few fatal cases, such as passwords being rejected.
It's multi-threaded, so the mpd and audioscrobbler parts can keep operating independently.
It queues songs if they can't be submitted immediately, and this queue can be saved periodically as well as when the program exits, so it aims to keep track of all the tracks that you play.

You can use this ebuild to install it. You might have to adjust the KEYWORDS line for your architecture - if it works, please tell me and I'll add the arch here.

truc · Advocate Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 3199

Do I have to run scmpc as root? if not, a few comments:

Maedhros · Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2006 7:55 pm Post subject:

WerK · Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2006 2:44 pm Post subject:

I have tried it out and I must say it works quite well

. Just copied that example config file (you should make ebuild do it automatically), changed paths to my ~/.scmpc as you suggested and works without a problem. Guess that I will replace mpdscribble with that, because this one is much smaller and can be run as user

Good job and thanks for great client

P.S : ah, no problems also with UTF-8, you can check @ http://www.last.fm/user/werkon/

_________________
Regards,
WerK

Maedhros · Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2006 6:16 pm Post subject:

WerK · Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 12:58 pm Post subject:

I have found a little rather annoying issue with scmpc : when I shut down my comp using halt command everything is OK. But next time I start up my machine the scmpc which is started by my .xsession file complains about :

Maedhros · Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 5:13 pm Post subject:

Hmm, I've noticed some odd things happening there, too. If you send scmpc the TERM signal, which is the default with kill I think, it shuts down normally and removes the pid file. If you send it a KILL signal though it just dies - that's one of the two signals you can't catch. I'm going to try to add some code to change the permissions on the pid file back to something sensible before opening it, and see if that fixes it. I have no idea why the file gets its permissions changed to 000 though.

As for this message:

WerK · Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 7:13 pm Post subject:

Maedhros · Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 8:30 pm Post subject:

Ok, I've released version 0.1.1 which should hopefully solve all this. I'm still not entirely sure why it was happening, but I suspect a 'umask(0777)' in daemon_fork that wasn't described anywhere, so any new files that got created got created with 0 permissions. daemon_pid_create which I used to use changed the umask before and after creating the file, so I'm still not entirely sure why it sometimes ended up with 0 permissions...

Sorry it tooks so long to reply to this, but I've been really swamped by work this week...
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No-one's more important than the earthworm.

WerK · Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 9:30 pm Post subject:

Maedhros · Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 9:51 pm Post subject:

Maedhros · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 8:19 am Post subject:

Version 0.2.0 is out!

This has been pretty much completely rewritten, and it should fix a lot of potential bugs. The MPD code in particular was fairly broken before - I think the only reason it actually worked half the time was due to sheer luck.

There are no new features, but that's because so far it does everything I want. If anyone has any feature requests, tell me, and I'll see what can be done.

_________________
No-one's more important than the earthworm.

WerK · Posted: Sat Mar 25, 2006 9:23 pm Post subject:

oops, looks like I have a problem with the most recent version. I noticed that new songs aren't appearing after a update so I ran it in foreground and debug enabled mode and I get this every time a song plays :

Maedhros · Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2006 8:46 pm Post subject:

That's very odd. Have you got crossfade enabled? Does the new song get reported by scmpc instantly when it starts playing? The realtime value is at least consistent with the timing in the log, so it must be something odd about the reported_time value. Does that value make sense for it to be half way through the song?
_________________
No-one's more important than the earthworm.

WerK · Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2006 11:57 am Post subject:

It looks like some of mine mp3's are b0rken ... it does that only with some songs and not with others, the problem probably isn't in your program.
_________________
Regards,
WerK

zeppelin_II · n00b Joined: 01 Apr 2006 Posts: 10

do last.fm changed their submission addres ?

Maedhros · Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 3:06 pm Post subject:

No, they've just turned off song submissions for a while: http://www.last.fm/forum/21713/_/51596.

_________________
No-one's more important than the earthworm.

zeppelin_II · n00b Joined: 01 Apr 2006 Posts: 10

oh, yes missed that, now everything is working fine

REDONDOS · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2005 Posts: 13

Hello. I've been using mpdscribble until someone (rc0) suggested scmpc on the last.fm gentoo forum.

What I like about scmpc is that:
a) It keeps a cache file. I haven't tested it much, but I have the feeling I won't be losing any more submissions.
b) Works with crossfading enabled. I never questioned myself why mpdscribble didn't work with it.
c) It's simpler. I inserted it into my mpd init script, and it hasn't ever given me a problem. Of course, I just installed it.

Here's what I added:
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec /usr/bin/scmpc -- -f /home/redondos/.scmpc/scmpc.conf
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --exec /usr/bin/scmpc --oknodo

While this is what I have for mpdscribble, after a while of experimenting with it:
CONF=/home/redondos/.mpdscribble/mpdscribble.conf
start-stop-daemon --start -p /var/run/mpdscribble.pid -b -m --exec /usr/bin/mpdscribble -- --conf $CONF --verbose 1
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet -p /var/run/mpdscribble.pid -m --exec /usr/bin/mpdscribble || eerror "mpdscribble is not running"

Of course, I am only showing the relevant lines. Just in case anyone needs them!

Thanks, and cheers.

--
redondos

kesara · n00b Joined: 05 Aug 2004 Posts: 69 Location: Sri Lanka

This program works fine on my system.
And as REDONDOS mentioned it is a good idea if you add a scmpc init script.
Right now I'm using my own init script to start scmpc.
Thx Maedhros and Keep up the good work.

BTW This is my scmpc init script..

OgRo · Posted: Sat May 20, 2006 11:35 pm Post subject:

nice

it seems to be a great package.

will it ever be in portage?
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OgRo

Linux user #297942

Maedhros · Posted: Mon May 29, 2006 7:09 pm Post subject:

I've just released 0.2.1, which is just a bugfix release really. If you find any more bugs, please let me know - and I think I've now setup Berlios to email me when someone files bugs, after I discovered there was one sitting there for nearly a month before I found it. :oops:

Thanks for the init script, kesara! OgRo, it probably won't be getting into portage anytime soon as it probably isn't widely used enough, I don't think. By the way, if any of you have any ideas for something else this program should do, please tell me.

Perhaps dropping root privileges for when it's being run by an init script?
_________________
No-one's more important than the earthworm.

GentlemanFinn · Posted: Tue May 30, 2006 2:46 pm Post subject:

bladus · Apprentice Joined: 27 Jul 2005 Posts: 233

I have a problem with the connection to audioscrobbler.
scmpc reports

zedek · n00b Joined: 24 Mar 2006 Posts: 10 Location: Reims, France

i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -Wl,-O1 -Wl,--as-needed -Wl,--sort-common -s -lpthread -largtable2 -lcurl -ldl -lgnutls -lgcrypt -lgpg-error -lz -lconfuse -ldaemon ./src/audioscrobbler.o ./src/libmpd.o ./src/md5.o ./src/misc.o ./src/mpd.o ./src/preferences.o ./src/scmpc.o -o src/scmpc
./src/audioscrobbler.o: In function `cache_thread':
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x591): undefined reference to `pthread_testcancel'
./src/audioscrobbler.o: In function `as_submit_queue':
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x72f): undefined reference to `curl_escape'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x767): undefined reference to `curl_free'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x7d9): undefined reference to `curl_escape'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x7f0): undefined reference to `curl_escape'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x809): undefined reference to `curl_escape'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x820): undefined reference to `curl_escape'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x88c): undefined reference to `curl_free'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x898): undefined reference to `curl_free'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x8a0): undefined reference to `curl_free'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x8a8): undefined reference to `curl_free'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x98a): undefined reference to `curl_easy_setopt'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x9a5): undefined reference to `curl_easy_setopt'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x9c3): undefined reference to `curl_easy_setopt'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0x9d1): undefined reference to `curl_easy_perform'
audioscrobbler.c

.text+0xbe9): undefined reference to `curl_easy_strerror'

It is on ~x86 with GCC 4.1.1