Sonica - Central Music Player and Organizer

Sonica is a collection of software, that shares many similarities with the wonderful mpd and mopidy. Sonica is also built up around a central daemon, but unlike the mpd architecture, does not assume that music is only located in one place or available through many platforms.

The goal of the Sonica project is to implement a music system that is collaborative-first, meaning party-play is assumed to be the primary means of use, but that also allows a single user to take advantage of the functionality without being burdened.

Architecture

The core of Sonica is the daemon that implements a server following the Sonica interface as defined by the gRPC spec.

Client software then communicates with the daemon via gRPC (or in the case of the web-client, the generated HTTP REST interface). This allows easy creation of something like chat-bots in any language supported by gRPC, without writing a lot of boilerplate to interface with Sonica.

Each client and the daemon has their own README with build information and the like.

Installation

Currently Sonica is only pre-packaged for use with nix. To install it via nix, the repo has a root map of tools:

sonica = import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/SEbbaDK/sonica/archive/v0.2.tar.gz) { };
# Then sonica.cli, sonica.daemon, etc. is packages that can be imported into a shell

This also means you can try different features out with:

nix run -f "https://github.com/sebbadk/sonica/archive/master.tar.gz" cli

Directly installing with nixos it could be done as:

let
	sonica = import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/SEbbaDK/sonica/archive/v0.2.tar.gz) { };
in
{
	environment.systemPackages [ sonica.daemon sonica.cli ];
}

Build instructions

To work on any part of Sonica, the prepare.py script is needed to generate gRPC code for the language. To get started with the discord client, just run ./prepare/prepare.py discord. This requires the python packages from the prepare/requirements.txt, as well as protoc needing to be in the path. (Check the gRPC web page for info on how to install it on your platform) The easiest way to work on Sonica is to use the nix package manager, as all parts of Sonica has shells set up, so only nix-shell is needed for development. For preparation, use nix-shell in the root and then sonica-prepare will be in your path.

Arch-specific instructions

To get everything working on Arch and Arch-derived distributions, follow the following steps:

1. Install the crystal and shards packages from the Arch repositories
2. In a terminal, navigate to the root directory of the Sonica repo
3. Run shards init
4. Run echo -e "dependencies:\n\tlogger:\n\t\tgithub: crystal-lang/logger.cr\n\tgrpc:\n\t\tgithub: jgaskins/grpc" >> shard.yml
5. Run shards install and then restart your shell

From here, you can start install requirements and preparing specific installation modules. For python-based modules (such as discord and daemon):

1. Run python -m venv venv, and then active the virtual environment, if you want to use a virtual environment.
2. Run python -m pip install --upgrade pip followed by pip install -r prepare/requirements.txt
3. For each [MODULE] you wish to work on, run pip install -r [MODULE]/requirements.txt, then python prepare/prepare.py --protoc-gen-crystal ./bin/protoc-gen-crystal --protoc-gen-grpc ./bin/grpc_crystal [MODULE]