MusicBee Remote (plugin)

A Plugin for MusicBee that allows you to control it through the MusicBee Remote Android Application
Application

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Table of Contents

• About the Project
  • Built With
• Getting Started
  • Prerequisites
  • Installation
• Usage
• Contributing
• License
• Contact
• Acknowledgements

About the Project

The plugin is an essential part of MusicBee Remote. It acts as a bridge that allows the Android application to communicate with MusicBee. The plugin exposes a socket server (TCP) that listens for incoming connections from the plugin.

It uses a text based protocol that is uses newline separated JSON messages. Thoses messages are then translated to calls of the MusicBee API.

The plugin also implements an intermediate caching layer for library metadata.

Built With

• Newtonsoft.Json
• NLog
• TinyMessenger
• LiteDB
• StructureMap

Getting Started

In order to get started with the project as a developer there are a few steps you need to follow.

Prerequisites

The project requires Visual Studio 2019 Community. Parts of it can run on Mono, for example the mbrc-tester, so you should be able to work on parts of the protocol implementation without the need of Windows and Visual Studio, however, for integration testing an environment with Windows, Visual Studio and MusicBee installed is required.

After getting the basic environment setup you just need to clone the project from command line:

git clone https://github.com/musicbeeremote/android-app.git

or you could use your visual Git interface to clone the repository.

Installation

After cloning the project you can go and open the MBRC.sln solution in Visual Studio. The first thing you need to do is to restore the NuGet dependencies so that you can start build the solution.

Usage

While building and testing the application you need a network interface that will listen for incoming connections. This has to be in the same network as the one where the device you use to test is.

If you are using a Windows Virtual Machine for development as I do, then you have to make sure that the virtual machine is using a Bridged connection, otherwise you might not be able to connect to the plugin.

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome. The contribution guide should follow soon.

Building

You can build the application either through Visual Studio or by running build.bat. The bat file supports either Release by default or Debug configurations.

It will also copy the merged mb_remote.dll to the MusicBee plugin's folder.

License

The source code of the application is licensed under the GPLv3 license. See LICENSE for more information

MusicBee Remote (Plugin for MusicBee)
Copyright (C) 2011-2020  Konstantinos Paparas

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Contact

MusicBee Remote - @MusicBeeRemote

Project Link: https://github.com/musicbeeremote/android-app

Acknowledgements

• Steven Mayall

For making such a great music player, and for all his assistance with API support.