OwnTone Player for Audiophiles

This is an audiophile-oriented remote controller for the OwnTone music server (previously forked-daapd), migrated from a previous project for the MPD protocol. This player is designed for the purpose of audio playback, aiming to deal with two core issues in network audio playback.

Firstly, the traditional clients are lightweight, leaving heavy load for the music servers to support functions such as browsing, search, and streaming artworks. These jobs can cause a significant latency to the sensitive audio-grade music servers. In order to improve the sound quality, we implement this player with the aim in mind that the loads of the music server and the renderer are minimized. The philosophy is to handle most of loads in this player, which is nearly isolated from the real-time playback loop. In other words, the functions including browsing and search are locally performed by this player. All metadata of albums, as well as artworks, are cached in the client locally. In this way, the music server can fully serve streaming the music data to the renderer with almost zero load for other tasks.

Secondly, many players are not designed for true music lovers who have a large collection of albums. It is not uncommon that the user-inferace got annoyingly slow when more than 1,000 albums were imported. We design this player with this consideration in mind, providing an elegant and friendly user-interface for efficiently handling a large collection of albums.

The cost of this player (actually a remote controller) is its nature of resource hungry. For a collection of about 3,000 disks and 40,000 tracks, the process of this player can consume more than 2G of memory in the Windows 10 environment. Fortunately, such a system requirement is not really an issue for most users.

Key Features

• Friendly with a large number of albums. The player has been tested with a collection more than 3,000 CDs.
• This player is album-oriented. All the tracks in the OwnTone server are reorganized into albums. Compared with individual tracks, album is a much more structural and meaningful unit for serious music lovers' critical listening.
• Many audio grade music servers and renderers are built on low-power devices such as NAS and Raspberry Pi. To reduce the loads of these devices, all the loading are taken by the controller side (i.e. this player). This design philosophy results a slim, mimimal, somewhat slow player, but both server/renderer sides benefit from stability, lower jitter, and better sound quailty.

Environment Requirement

• Python 3
• QT 5
• Operating system: Windows/Mac/Linux and so on. The code has been verified on Windows 10 and Mac OS Mojave.
• A collection of audio files that is manipulated by an OwnTone server. More information of the setup of the OwnTone server. The OwnTone server has to enable websocket for receiving push notifications.
• An ideal setting is comprised of a standalone music server running the OwnTone service, a standalone music renderer like a Hi-Fi DAC/Stream Player that supports Apple AirPlay or Shairport Sync, and this player installed on another powerful desktop/laptop in the same LAN.

Setup

Install related packages

pip install -r requirements.txt

Assign the MPD music server and restart the player

Configure the OwnTone server in the file config.json as follows for your OwnTone server at 192.168.0.1 with the default port 3689. Note that your OwnTone has to be configured enabling websocket (with a default port 3688 usually) for this player to receive push notifications from the server.

{"host": "192.168.0.1", "port": 3689, "volume": 100}

Usage

Start the player

python player_gui.py

Rebuild the library for your music collection

In the first time, the player takes some time depending on the size of your music collection. For a collection of 3,000 CDs on a remote SSD, the procedure will perform in 10 minutes.

Play an album

Browse the albums in the grid view

Four sizes of the grid views are available. The player spends a number of seconds when it launchs the grid view or list view.

Config the OwnTone server and select output devices

Issues to Note

Added Dates

The only time information returned by the OwnTone server is time_added, which is the time the file being imported into the database. time_added is less useful if you rebuild your database several times. The other time information stored in the OwnTone database, time_modified, is more useful since it is the last time the file being modifieid. The current OwnTone API does not return time_modified so you can hack the OwnTone database in the following way.

1. Open the database

   sqlite3 songs3.db
   

2. Replace the time_added with time_modified for each file

   UPDATE files SET time_added = time_modified;

For the files originally maintained by an official iTunes server, the script extracts the their creation date from the iTunes metadata, and updates the time_added fields in the OwnTone database.

Artwork

The OwnTone server provides the embedded artwork of albums. For an album that does not contain the embedded artwork, the great tool get_cover_art can be used for automatically searching the artwork from iTunes and embedding the artwork into the file. The tool can perform on the folder of the entire music collection for embedding all the files.