After the troubles with Netjuke after my upgrade to FC6, I decided to start looking around for a replacement for it. In my searching, I came across ampache, which offers basically everything Netjuke did, and more. Here’s a short version of all the great things:
- A ‘search’ that searches everything (artists, albums, tracks) all at the same time
- Automatic import of album art from amazon, painlessly.
- The notion of a “Catalog” thats a collection of music.
- Automatic support for remote Catalogs, with API keys and security! Hey guys, if you read this, and install Ampache, I’d be happy to share my music collection — drop me a line. You know who you are.
Oh, and if you want an account to try it out, drop me an e-mail and I’ll set one up for you. - Builtin support for per-track ratings, and suggestions via last.fm. Awesome
- The UI is quite fast.
- Builtin support for downsampling.
- Cool community features, like the ability to see the last N tracks played (by everyone) as well as what each user is listening to right now.
The only downside is that I had to increase my PHP memory limit to import my music collection, but once I figured that out, it imported all my music, and works great. Rescanning for new music is painless and reasonably fast, as well. All it needs now is a color theme that isn’t so bland, and a better logo…