Installation is fairly simple. Just do the standard install as root:
tar -xvzf py-sonic-*.tar.gz
cd py-sonic-*
python setup.py install
You can also install directly using pip or easy_install
pip install py-sonic
The library is now usable for both Python 2 and 3! A requirement for the "six" module was added to support this, but this otherwise works for both 2 and 3.
This library follows the REST API almost exactly (for now). If you follow the documentation on http://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp or you do a:
pydoc libsonic.connection
I have also added documentation at http://stuffivelearned.org/doku.php?id=programming:python:py-sonic
This is about as basic as it gets. We are just going to set up the connection and then get a couple of random songs.
#!/usr/bin/env python
from pprint import pprint
import libsonic
# We pass in the base url, the username, password, and port number
# Be sure to use https:// if this is an ssl connection!
conn = libsonic.Connection('https://music.example.com' , 'myuser' ,
'secretpass' , port=443)
# Let's get 2 completely random songs
songs = conn.getRandomSongs(size=2)
# We'll just pretty print the results we got to the terminal
pprint(songs)As you can see, it's really pretty simple. If you use the documentation provided in the library:
pydoc libsonic.connection
or the api docs on subsonic.org (listed above), you should be able to make use of your server without too much trouble.
Right now, only plain old dictionary structures are returned. The plan for a later release includes the following:
- Proper object representations for Artist, Album, Song, etc.
- Lazy access of members (the song objects aren't created until you want to do something with them)
In the future, I would like to make this a little more "pythonic" and add some classes to wrap up the data returned from the server. Right now, the data is just returned in the form of a dict, but I would like to have actual Song, Album, Folder, etc. classes instead, or at least an alternative. For now, it works.
NOTE: I've noticed a wart with the upstream Subsonic API wherein any of the Connection methods that would normally return a list of dictionary elements (getPlaylists() for example), will only return a dictionary if there is a single return element. I plan on changing this in py-sonic so that any methods of that nature will always return a list, even if there is only a single dict in the list.