Installing the Jamroom LOFI Creator
If you are a licensed user of Jamroom, the Jamroom Bonus Pack contains a very useful feature called the “LOFI Creator”. It’s a plug-in for your Artist Menu that allows an artist to create a new LOFI song file out of an uploaded LOFI song file. It requires the “LAME” mp3 encoder/decoder binary to be installed on your system though, and only works with MP3 files. Here are instructions on installing LAME, and setting up the Jamroom LOFI Creator.
Installing LAME
The first thing to do is to make sure your system meets the Jamroom LOFI Creator requirements:
- You are NOT running Microsoft Windows on your Server, any version. Windows does not support the necessary libraries and forking capabilities that are needed by the Jamroom LOFI creator.
- You are (preferably) running Linux, or some flavor of UNIX.
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These instructions assume that you are running a Linux Based server - note that the installation is the same on other UNIX like operating systems (such as FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.) - however, you will need to compile your own version of LAME for your platform. |
The next step in setting up the Jamroom LOFI Creator is to download the "LAME" ( LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder) pre-compiled Binary from the Jamroom "Extras" download page:
http://www.jamroom.net/Downloads_Extras
After downloading, unzip the archive, and upload the "lame" file inside into your Jamroom directory on your server.
Change permissions on the jamroom/lame file to 555.
Configuring Jamroom
- Log in to your Jamroom as the Master Admin, and go to the Admin Menu -> Jamroom Config section.
- Click on "Custom Buttons" link from the Jamroom Config menu, then click on the "Create Button" button. There are 3 values that will need to be filled in on this page in order to create the "LOFI Creator" button. Place the following values in their corresponding fields:
- Button Label → lofi creator (or whatever you wold like to call it)
- Button URL → decoder.php?mode=menu
- Button Quota → choose the Jamroom Quota(s) you want this option to be available to. It is recommended that you only show the LOFI Creator to Artist Quotas, as the Jamroom Member Quotas do not have songs, so the LOFI Creator is of no use to your Member accounts.
- Click on the "Create Button" form submit button and your Custom Button has been created!
Alternate Config Files
Beginning with Jamroom Bonus Pack 2.67, the "decoder.php" script has been modified to allow the use of Alternate config files. By default, if no "config" URL variable is passed in to the decoder.php script, the "decoder.cfg.php" config file will be used. This file is located in the jamroom/config directory. To create an "Alternate" config file, simply copy the default decoder.cfg.php file to a different name (like "new_decoder.cfg.php" for example). Then, when creating your Custom Button, you can define the alternate config file:
decoder.php?mode=menu&config=new_decoder.cfg.php
This tells the decoder.php script to use the "new_decoder.cfg.php" config file for its configuration, instead of the default config file. This allows you to create different LOFI Creators on your system (i.e. for different bit rates, acoustic modeling, etc.)
Troubleshooting
Now that you have created the new LOFI Creator, here are some tips on it’s use:
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The faster the processor in your server, the quicker the conversion process will be. Note that while LAME is doing the actual conversion of the HIFI file to a LOFI file, it will eat up a significant amount of your CPU time, so it’s recommended that servers with fast processors utilize the LOFI Creator. On my Pentium II 400 development system (very slow by today’s standards) it takes well over 1 minute to convert a 5 megabyte MP3 file. On a Pentium 4 2400 MHz system, it takes about 25 seconds. On a Dual Xeon server, it takes about 10 seconds.
If you have any more questions about the LOFI Creator, visit the Jamroom Forums and post your issue. Thanks!
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