GMP

Hi all,
In the absence of spotify accessibility, I have switched over to Google Play Music for my musical needs.

The website is mostly accessible on Windows, but I find it a struggle on OS X. In any case, web apps annoy me, so I give you GMP:

GMP (Google Music Player) is a GUI application written in Python. It is open source, and contributions are welcome ETC.

Unfortunately, because of something which I can't quite pinpoint, I can't make an app bundle or exe of GMP, so you have to run from source. This really isn't as big a thing as you might think. If you put an & after the command it'll go off int the background and you can terminate Terminal. Or you can use tux or screen if you prefer.

Getting GMP:
To get GMP you need to install a couple of things. Honestly, it's so easy, you can probably just paste this shell code into your terminal and rock n roll:

<script>
#First install Home Brew.
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
# Get everything we need:
brew install git hg python wxpython
# Download the gap source:
git clone https://github.com/chrisnorman7/gmp.git
# CD into the gap directory.
cd gmp
# Make sure pip is up-to-date.
pip install -U pip
# Install the required python packages:
pip install -r requirements.txt
<script>

You should now have everything you need for a working copy of GMP.

If you're install on windows, install:
* Python 2.7.9 32-bit (http://www.python.org/download)
* wxPython 32-bit (www.wxpython.org)
* Windows Git (http://msysgit.github.com)

Then follow everything from the git clone downwards.

Running GMP:
To Run GMP, cd into the directory you saved GMP and run:
python main.py

If you want to be able to CMD+Q the terminal (or exit CMD) when GMP is running, the command should be:
python main.py &

If you're running windows you can create a desktop shortcut, and set the target to something like:
c:\python27\pythonw.exe "c:\users\username\gmp\main.py"
And make sure the start in field contains something like "c:\users\username".

This all assumes that your username is simply username... On my system, c:\users\username is replaced by c:\users\chris, but I'm sure you can figure out your own directory names.

unfortunately the closest to a shortcut I can get to on Mac OS X is this:

<script>
#!/bin/bash
cd ~/gmp
git pull
python main.py&
</script>

If you set Terminal Preferences -> Profiles -> Shell -> When Shell Exits: to "Close the window" or "Close if the shell exited cleanly", then you're left with an empty terminal window, and GMP on screen. You can just CMD+q the terminal window.

To update, assuming you've not used the shell script I just wrote above, simply cd into the gap directory, and type:
git pull

I hope you all enjoy GMP. Is is well worth the £10.99 / month, which I was paying for Spotify before.

Google Play Music also has a month free trial, and you can save stuff to a library, which allows a bit more control over your music.

If you like it, please consider adding any of the songs in the Public Transport EP by Last Train Home (my band) to your playlists, and play them a few times so we get some royalties.

That's it: No hidden features (everything's in the menus), no caveats, just raw awesomeness.

It's pretty well stable, I've been using it for ages, and a couple of others have too. There's a wealth of preferences, so if you don't like something, please check the preferences and everything else in the Options menu before submitting problems.

If there are problems, add them as a bug report on Github (www.github.com/chrisnorman7/gmp.git), leave a comment on here, or send me an email ([email protected]).

Cheers, and enjoy.