About

Musicbox is a browser-based music library explorer for a home server. It parses standard ID3v2 tags of your audio files and provides a simple interface to search, sort, and filter your music collection.

What problem does it solve

I have a pretty extensive music collection (around 5 thousand tracks), but navigating through it had always been very frustrating — as a Linux user, I couldn't find any good music manager satisfying my needs.

Features

• two types of views: by tracks (list view) and by releases (grid view)
• searching, filtering, and sorting
• detailed library statistics
• audio player
• supported formats: mp3, flac

Development Notes

• Frontend: React.js (TypeScript)
• Backend: Node.js (TypeScript), PostgreSQL, Nginx

The application runs in four Docker containers:

• db-music (the heart of the app)
• api (Node.js REST API providing all sorts of CRUD operations; the current version of frontend client uses only reading/filtering/sorting/searching capabilities of API, it doesn't modify any data in database)
• client (React.js client, regular SPA)
• nginx (set up as a reverse proxy; routes requests to client and api containers)

It is primarily a database-centric app. The work with the database (writing different types of queries to provide filtering/sorting/searching/pagination features as well as basic CRUD operations) took the most time of development. Also, I haven't been using any ORM, just raw SQL via node-postgres.

App Architecture

Database Schema

API Doc

http://musicbox.com:8000/api/v1/api-docs/

Getting Started

All configuration is through the env vars and docker-compose.yml.

Note that for the app to be actually useful, make sure your music library is properly tagged (the app parses only standard ID3v2 tags)

1. Mount the directory where you store music as the volume of the api container (in docker-compose.yml)

  api:
    container_name: api
    ...
    volumes:
      # the path after `:` (i.e. `/music/`) should match the path in 
      # `MUSIC_LIB_DIR` variable in `./api/.dev.env`
      - /mnt/I9FWKI857RFW5WMC2/music_archive/:/music/

2. Start up Docker Compose. On first run Node.js will start parsing all tracks adding them to database, it will take some time.

   docker-compose up