Announcing: Harmonium Music Player

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Installed this app yesterday and it works pretty darn good. Thanks.

Here's a couple feature requests.
1) Would like a default.txt kind of like pytivo uses for metadata, but for referencing cover art on a per directory basis if there is none embedded in the file.
2) Lyric lookup & display.

 

I'm glad it's working well for you, reneg. Thanks for the feature suggestions.

 

Couple of questions, since I am new to your program, not sure if I am using it wrong or if I found a feature request....

Pressing play while on a disc plays that disk. OK works. Browsing to another disk and pressing enter should add to the current 'now playing' list? It does not and instead prompts for the name of a playlist to save to. How to add to the 'now playing' list?

It seems the player only displays cover art contained in the id3 tag, not cover.jpg in the folder with the disc mp3 files. I need to edit all my mp3s to add the cover art to them? If so, any suggestions of software that can automate that task for some 250k files?


While playing music and browsing to other titles to add to playlist, each time a button is pressed the music skips.

Is there a place to edit the name that shows up in the Music, Photos and Showcases list to start the program? The single word Harmonium is non discript to the rest of my family and friends. Can it display some other text? The title screen when the program opens as well would be nice if it could be edited.

It does take quite a while to load. I understood the first time when its building the cache (1.5 hrs) but when loading the cache it still takes over 20 minutes to start. Is this normal and as intended?

Please don't get me wrong, this looks like a long complaint list but the package is so far ahead of what else is out there that I have high hope of at least finding work arounds/instructions to make it usable for now and improve going forward. GREAT WORK so far, very impressive.

 

Yeah, you can only add individual tracks to the now playing list in the current release. Fixing this is near the top of the to do list.

The embedded art is the only supported art right now. You're the second person to ask for this now, so maybe I'll bump it up. It is on the list.

I don't have this issue, and haven't heard any other reports of it. What kind of Tivo do you have? What are the PC and network specs?

There's currently no way to change this as a user.

For a library of 250k files, I suppose this is normal, but not intended. My library is only about 5,000 files, so I haven't done any testing at that size. I have noticed that my Harmonium server running Linux is substantially slower starting up (after the cache is built) than the same machine was when running Windows XP, but I haven't spent any time trying to figure out why. I'm thinking about moving the cache from a flat file to something like sqlite, but it probably won't be done anytime soon. The idea is that we would not have to read the whole database into memory at startup, we'd simply query it as needed while Harmonium runs. This would immensely help people with large libraries in terms of both startup speed and memory consumption. That's issue 25.

I'm always happy to get feedback.

 

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Hey, thanks for the detailed reply. As far as my setup goes, TivoHD with 1TB drive internal, wired Gigabit Ethernet network with netgear switch. Server is only a 1.4Ghz PentiumM with 1.25GB memory and 4TB of storage so I could understand if its limited by server HP and its shared with pyTivo. Is the mp3 actually played on the tivo or streamed from the server?

As far as the large library goes, at least it handles it all and once running seems snappy enough. The load time is not that big a deal for me as I intend it to run most of the time.

 

I thought I'd give this a try today.

Using the latest version, I followed the Windows instructions (Windows7). After a successful test, I installed it as a service.

Everything I try to play now results in: "An error occured while running the application. The application closed during a read (0x50006)"

I stopped the service and opened the harmonium.bat cmd window. Running it this way, everything worked fine.

Restarted the service and got the same error.

The error occurs right after I select an Artist to display the album list. If it matters, I use iTunes with TuneUp (which cleans tags and pulls in album art).

 

Mp3tag can easily embed cover art into a collection of MP3 files.
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

Procedure:
- In Mp3tag, change directory to root of your music files
- Select all files (Ctrl-A)
- Press Shift+Alt+5
- Choose "Import cover from file"
- Enter "cover.jpg" (or whatever name you use) as the input filename

 

My first guess is that this is some kind of security/permissions issue associated with running as a service. In harmonium's logs directory, there should be a file wrapper.log. Do you see errors in here when running as a service?

In your Windows services (Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services) what's listed under "Log On As" for the Harmonium service?

 

I mainly run my system on a User account, so that must be the case.

I'll check when I get home. Thanks

 

I had this problem as well when attempting to run Harmonium as a service under the Local System Account. I think it has to do with where the Harmonium 'temp' file (example: harmonium1927088746043106050.txt) is written by Java - which appears to be under the Users directory by default. I managed to solve the problem by changing this location to be under the Harmonium directory by adding this to the wrapper.conf:

Code:

wrapper.java.additional.2=-Djava.io.tmpdir=..\temp

and adjusting the security/permissions of that temp folder (which may not have been necessary - I'm still trying to fully understand the Windows 7 security model).

Running the service under my regular User account also solved the problem.

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I really like all the enhancements in the current update. Thanks for your work on this.

I see the known issue of the screen blanking setting not working reliably - I normally set it to 'off' but, it still kicks in. But, that's just a minor annoyance at this point.

The biggest problem I'm currently experiencing with Harmonium on Windows 7 (64-bit) is that, after sitting idle (no music playing) for a varying amount of time, I get an error that requires a restart of Harmonium. It seems to happen when running in either Console mode or as a Service. Here are some snippets from the wrapper.log (the numbers after the exception vary - I've seen anywhere from 2 >= 2 to 11 >= 11) :

Console Mode:

Code:

STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/30 21:59:32 | --> Wrapper Started as Console
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/30 21:59:32 | Java Service Wrapper Community Edition 32-bit 3.3.9
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/30 21:59:32 |   Copyright (C) 1999-2009 Tanuki Software, Ltd.  All Rights Reserved.
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/30 21:59:32 |     http://wrapper.tanukisoftware.org
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/30 21:59:32 | 
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/30 21:59:32 | Launching a JVM...
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/30 21:59:34 | WrapperManager: Initializing...
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/30 21:59:35 | HME SDK 1.4 (TiVo, Inc.)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/30 21:59:35 | Looking for music collection cache...
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/30 21:59:35 | Cache found. Loading cache...
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/30 22:01:42 | LOG: added factory
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/30 22:01:42 | MDNS: http://192.168.1.151:7288/harmonium/
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/30 22:43:47 | LOG: 192.168.1.140 icon.png HTTP GET - to factory /harmonium/
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 04:50:27 | Exception in thread "JmDNS.SocketListener" java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 3 >= 3
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 04:50:27 | 	at java.util.Vector.elementAt(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 04:50:27 | 	at javax.jmdns.DNSRecord.suppressedBy(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 04:50:27 | 	at javax.jmdns.DNSOutgoing.addAnswer(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 04:50:27 | 	at javax.jmdns.JmDNS.handleQuery(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 04:50:27 | 	at javax.jmdns.JmDNS$SocketListener.run(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 04:50:27 | 	at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Service:

Code:

STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/31 06:52:03 | --> Wrapper Started as Service
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/31 06:52:03 | Java Service Wrapper Community Edition 32-bit 3.3.9
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/31 06:52:03 |   Copyright (C) 1999-2009 Tanuki Software, Ltd.  All Rights Reserved.
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/31 06:52:03 |     http://wrapper.tanukisoftware.org
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/31 06:52:03 | 
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/31 06:52:05 | Launching a JVM...
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 06:52:11 | WrapperManager: Initializing...
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 06:52:11 | HME SDK 1.4 (TiVo, Inc.)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 06:52:12 | Looking for music collection cache...
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 06:52:12 | Cache found. Loading cache...
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 06:54:45 | LOG: added factory
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 06:54:45 | MDNS: http://192.168.1.151:7288/harmonium/
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 09:34:02 | Exception in thread "JmDNS.SocketListener" java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 7 >= 7
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 09:34:02 | 	at java.util.Vector.elementAt(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 09:34:02 | 	at javax.jmdns.DNSRecord.suppressedBy(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 09:34:02 | 	at javax.jmdns.DNSOutgoing.addAnswer(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 09:34:02 | 	at javax.jmdns.JmDNS.handleQuery(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 09:34:02 | 	at javax.jmdns.JmDNS$SocketListener.run(Unknown Source)
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/12/31 09:34:02 | 	at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
STATUS | wrapper  | 2009/12/31 11:54:20 | <-- Wrapper Stopped

 

Thanks, that makes sense. I'll log an issue to handle this better in a future release.

This is an issue I specifically tried to fix in this release. I used to have this problem too. Did you upgrade from a previous version of Harmonium? If so, it's important to clean out your lib directory and replace it with only the contents of the 0.7 release's lib directory. Specifically, I suspect you still have hme.jar in your lib folder, which contains the buggy jmdns code that I replaced with jmdns-1.0.jar.

 

Thanks for the quick reply.

I did upgrade from a pervious version and there was an hme.jar file in the lib directory. I cleaned it out and replaced with the contents of the 0.7 lib directory.

I assume that's it but, I'll let you know if it continues to happen.

 

Great. Let me know if you continue to see the screen blanker issue, too. I wonder if it's related. (That would explain why I've never been able to reproduce it.)

 

I switched the Log On As to the Admin account and it's working on Service mode now.

 

I think we've a worthy successor to AudioFaucet here, with the added bonus that it seems more stable overall and is lighter weight to boot. Thanks for your work on this, Ian - it addresses a primary complaint I have about the Tivo software, that the standard Music app is just so awful I can't contemplate making the Tivo my all-in-one media device. I was actually getting ready to buy a separate network music player for the AV center until I grabbed Harmonium.

It looks good, it performs well, and no weird kludgy screen draws on my HD unit.

A couple of things:
* Browsing by album artist not only lists all the artists, but every track in the library as well (artist names first, then every track filename), which makes the 0-9 keys not very functional. This doesn't happen when browsing by track artist.
* The routine that builds the cache file seems to have serious problems with track #s and disc #s as stored in the metadata by iTunes (9.0.2 installed). If I change the track or disk ID3v2 metadata in iTunes, Harmonium stores a "0" for those values in the cache fields. Winamp reads the info correctly from the iTunes modified files, and if I open the file info and save back the same exact data with Winamp, the Harmonium cache file updates with correct values in the disk & track fields.
* I also have the problem with the screen blanker that, no matter what value I set, it always blanks after 5:00. Installed current version fresh - no prior versions installed.

One request: Would you consider using/supporting standard PLS or M3U playlist formats? It would be fantastic not to have to build playlists for multiple apps.

(Windows XP 32-bit, SP3, JRE 6U11, TivoHD w/software 11.0d)

 

THANKS! that worked very well. Still working on my files but for the 20k or so files I have done it worked a champ. Letting it run overnight on the rest. Now all will have imbeded cover art along with the cover.jpg so it will work either way. One problem down.....

 

What it's doing here is listing all the tracks that have no album artist set at the bottom of the album artist list. Maybe it would make more sense to have a single "Unknown" album artist that all these fall under.

This is the first I've heard of this one. If you'd be willing to send me a file that has the problem (ian dot olsen at gmail dot com) I'll look into it.

Bummer! I've still never seen this myself, but enough other people are reporting it, it has to be a real bug. When you go back into the options screen, does it show the new value you set (something other than 5 minutes)? You have to press SELECT on "Set Options" for the new setting to be saved, which is certainly non-intuitive.

m3u playlists are supported, read-only. You can play them, you just can't edit them.

 

I'm considering this program as an alternative to TiVo Desktop or AudioFaucet. It sounds good, but one thing in the Install document concerned me:

When Harmonium first starts, it reads and catalogs the music files
that it finds under your music root. This process may take several
minutes. (A sample collection of 3500 music files takes 20 minutes to
complete.) Until this process has completed, Harmonium will not
appear on your TiVo.

I'm in the process of moving my entire CD collection to my computer. Right now I have almost 9000 files on there. So does this mean that I won't be able to use Harmonium until 50 minutes after I turn my computer on EVERY DAY? Or have I misunderstood?

 

You've misunderstood. Building the cache happens just once, and is a bit time-consuming. Thereafter, Harmonium uses the cache it already built each time it starts up.

 

Good. I was hoping you'd say that. And then I suppose it has to run a little to include any new additions you've made to the iTunes library since the last time you ran it.