Low memory requirement (the demo instance runs on a Raspberry Pi3B+, using less than 10% of total memory even when transcoding)
User management
Recommendation engine
Audio transcode for maximum interoperability and low bandwith requirements
Persistent play queue across sessions
Subsonic API
Album artist
Multi-value tags: artists, genres, ...
Custom tags (ex: mood, genre, albummood, albumgrouping, ...)
MusicBrainzID support to handle duplicated artist and release names
Playlists, (only using Subsonic API for now)
Starred Album/Artist/Tracks (only using Subsonic API for now)
Systemd integration

Recommendation engine

LMS provides several ways to help you find the music you like:

Tag-based filters (ex: Rock, Metal and Aggressive, Electronic and Relaxed, ...)
Recommendations for similar artists and albums
Radio mode
Searches in album, artist and track names
Most played/Recently added music

The recommendation engine makes use of Self-Organizing Maps.
Notes:

constructing the map requires significant computation time on large collections (ex: half an hour for 40k tracks)
audio data is pulled from AcousticBrainz. Therefore your music files must contain the MusicBrainz Identifier for the recommendation engine to work properly (otherwise, only tag-based recommendations are provided)

Subsonic API

The API version implemented is 1.12.0 and has been tested on Android using the official application, Ultrasonic and DSub.

Since LMS uses metadata tags to organize music, a compatibility mode is used to navigate through the collection using the directory browsing commands.

The Subsonic API is enabled by default.

Note: since LMS stores hashed and salted passwords, it cannot handle the token authentication method defined from version 1.13.0.

Installation

From packages

Debian Buster packages

Buster packages are provided for amd64 and armhf architectures.

As root, trust the following debian package provider and add it in your list of repositories:

wget -O - https://debian.poupon.io/apt/debian/epoupon.gpg.key | apt-key add -
echo "deb https://debian.poupon.io/apt/debian buster main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/epoupon.list

To install or upgrade LMS:

apt update
apt install lms

The lms service is started just after the package installation, run by a dedicated lms system user.
Please refer to Deployment for further configuration options.

From source

Note: this installation process and the default values of the configuration files have been written for Debian Buster. Therefore, you may have to adapt commands and/or paths in order to fit to your distribution.

Build dependencies

Note: a C++17 compiler is needed to compile LMS

apt-get install g++ autoconf automake libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-system-dev libavutil-dev libavformat-dev libmagick++-dev libpstreams-dev libconfig++-dev libpstreams-dev ffmpeg libtag1-dev

You also need W4, that is not packaged yet on Debian. See installation instructions.

Build

Get the latest stable release and build it:

git clone https://github.com/epoupon/lms.git lms
cd lms
autoreconf -vfi
mkdir build
cd build
../configure --prefix=/usr

configure will report any missing library.

Note: in order to customize the installation directories, you can use the following options of the configure script:

--prefix (defaults to /usr/local).
--bindir (defaults to $PREFIX/bin).

make

Note: you can use make -jN to speed up compilation time (N is the number of compilation workers to spawn).

Installation

Note: the commands of this section require root privileges.

make install

Create a dedicated system user:

useradd --system lms

Copy the configuration files:

cp /usr/share/lms/default.conf /etc/lms.conf
cp /usr/share/lms/default.service /lib/systemd/system/lms.service

Create the working directory and give it access to the lms user:

mkdir /var/lms
chown lms:lms /var/lms

To make LMS run automatically during startup:

systemctl enable lms

Upgrade

To upgrade LMS from sources, you need to update the master branch and rebuild/install it:

cd build
git pull
make

Then using root privileges:

make install
systemctl restart lms

Deployment

Note: don't forget to give the lms user read access to the music directory you want to scan.

Configuration

LMS uses a configuration file, installed by default in /etc/lms.conf. It is recommended to edit this file and change relevant settings (listen address, listen port, working directory, Subsonic API activation, ...).

All other settings are set using the web interface (user management, scan settings, transcode settings, ...).

If a setting is not present in the configuration file, a hardcoded default value is used (the same as in the default.conf file)

Reverse proxy settings

LMS is shipped with an embedded web server, but it is recommended to deploy behind a reverse proxy. You have to set the behind-reverse-proxy option to true in the lms.conf configuration file.

Here is an example to make LMS properly work on myserver.org using nginx:

server {
    listen 80;

    server_name myserver.org;

    access_log            /var/log/nginx/myserver.access.log;

    proxy_request_buffering off;
    proxy_buffering off;
    proxy_buffer_size 4k;

    location / {

      proxy_set_header        Host $host;
      proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

      proxy_pass          http://localhost:5082;
      proxy_read_timeout  120;
    }
}

Run

systemctl start lms

Log traces can be accessed using journactl:

journalctl -u lms.service

To connect to LMS, just open your favorite browser and go to http://localhost:5082

Credits

Wt (http://www.webtoolkit.eu/)
bootstrap3 (http://getbootstrap.com/)
ffmpeg project (https://ffmpeg.org/)
Magick++ (http://www.imagemagick.org/Magick++/)
MetaBrainz (https://metabrainz.org/)
Bootstrap Notify: https://github.com/mouse0270/bootstrap-notify