Exordium Music Library

Introduction

Exordium is a read-only web-based music library system for Django. Exordium will read mp3, ogg vorbis, ogg opus, and m4a files from the host filesystem and provide an online interface to browse, download (as zipfiles or otherwise), and stream.

The HTML5 media player jPlayer is used to provide arbitrary streaming of music.

Exordium Main Screen

Exordium Main Screen

Exordium was built with a very specific set of operational goals and does not attempt to be a generic library suitable for widespread use. There are, in fact, no configuration options beyond those to define the file paths/URLs necessary for basic usage. Patches to add/change functionality will be happily received so long as they don’t interfere with or disable the current functionality by default, but there is no internal development goal to make Exordium a generic solution.

Download

Exordium is available to install on PyPI via pip install django-exordium. PyPI also hosts Python packages for Exordium in both source and Wheel formats, at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-exordium/. Source and Wheel downloads of all released versions can also be found at Exordium’s hompeage at https://apocalyptech.com/exordium/.

Exordium sourcecode is hosted at GitHub, and sourcecode archives of released versions can be found there at https://github.com/apocalyptech/exordium/releases

Documentation is included in the project’s docs/ directory, but is also uploaded to:

Detailed Documentation

Assumptions and Limitations provides information about how Exordium does things, and would be a good place to determine if Exordium is a good operational fit for the kind of web library app you’re looking for.

Screenshots contains screenshots of all of Exordium’s main pages, and is probably the best place to look to get a feel for how Exordium operates from a user perspective.

See Requirements for Exordium’s requirements, Installation for installation instructions onto an existing Django project, and Administration for information on administration and library upkeep.

If deploying via Apache, Apache/WSGI Deployment Issues contains some information that might be useful. Rocky/Alma/RHEL/OEL/Centos-Stream 8 Apache/WSGI Deployment HOWTO is a complete guide to how Django is deployed for my own use.

Changelog and TODO contain some information about version history and future plans.

Licenses contains information about Exordium’s license (3-Clause BSD) and of a couple of its components (MIT).

Other Information

The name “Exordium” comes from the fictional technology of the same name in Alastair Reynolds’ “Revelation Space” novels. It’s not a perfect name for the app, given that the Revelation Space Exordium would make a pretty lousy music library, but at least there’s some element of data storage and retrieval. Exordium the web-based music library, as opposed to its fictional counterpart, is only capable of retrieving music which has been imported to it in the past. I’ll be sure to contact all the major news organizations if I figure out a way to get it to retrieve music stored in the future.