LincolnBlogs

Some of you might remember that I used to run GnuMP3d as my home music server of choice. While this is still a great choice, after my recent new server install, I had an interesting choice to make.

The newest versions of GnuMP3d work fantastically like always, but they do not provide for any measure of security at all. You can use the music library as long as you can get to it. Now I know I can employ measures like iptables and hosts.deny, etc., but I decided I would still feel much more secure if I just ran my music server on a different VM that was only accessible from my intranet. I also did a little performance testing and found that GnuMP3d hogged up a lot of my system resources when it was starting up as well. All these factors and more sent me on a quest to once again look into some different streaming music servers.

There are really not very many of these available now that are current and full featured. There are, in fact, 4 that are hands down above the rest. The first was GnuMP3d, which, still, is a great piece of software. I just wanted something different for a while. I looked into Jinzora, which seemed to me to be completely overcomplicated and quite broken when not importing music collections via mp3 tags (stay away from this one). The one I almost settled on was Andromeda, a non-free software program, which works absolutely perfectly for what I wanted. For a measly $20 you can purchase the full version and I was *this* close to doing so until I decided I would give kPlaylist a spin.

kPlaylist is a LAMP app that is actually very easy and quick to get going, looks and works great and it’s strict OSS as well. It even provides the little bit of security I need to feel better about running it in my main server VM 🙂

If you are looking around for a nice way to access your personal music collection, you could surely do worse than kPlaylist. Do yourself a favor and hit the website and check it out today!