Google Music on VortexBox

**divreg** · 01-15-2012, 02:53 PM

This guide has been moved to the VortexBox wiki. See

How to enable X11 Forwarding on your VortexBox
How to install and use Google Play Music Manager

I have had success using google music to upload all of my songs to my google account. The service is free, and you can integrate purchased music from the android app store with your home collection, and keep up to 20,000 songs their. The service uploads your FLAC files and converts them on the fly to high bit rate mp3's.

Once your songs are uploaded, you can listen to them from anywhere on your android device or web browser.

The program you need to use to do this is called "google-musicmanager". It's a GUI program, so you need to install some tools on your VortexBox to get everything to work. You don't need a full desktop on your vortexbox to complete this.

Basically, I followed this post: running google music beta headless linux, and had to learn about x11-forwarding: Gentoo Wiki: X-Forwarding

DISCLAIMER: I have not tried this from either a Windows or Mac client, so if somebody wants to try this on those clients and has anything else to add, feel free to comment or edit the wiki. There also may be additional libraries to install that I could have missed. If so, comment.

**waltonb** · 01-16-2012, 12:34 PM

Nice! Thanks for posting this. I use X11 all the time to manage stuff on my headless vortex box from my linux laptop. (dvdae-gui for ripping dvd audio, easytag mp3/flac tagger, linux handbrake, etc.etc.)

For either MacOS or Windows, you'll need to run an X11 server on your laptop. It comes with MacOS X (I think it's an optional install tho). For windows you can get a free X11 server (and plenty of other unix tools) from cygwin.org.

I haven't checked out googlemusic yet, thanks for the pointer.

-bruce.

**Beeky** · 01-22-2012, 10:42 AM

Sounds great (although well out of my depth!)

When Google Music finally makes it to the UK I may well call on your expert knowledge

**happygirl** · 01-28-2012, 01:02 PM

Thanks for the wiki on how to install google music. Being a linux newbie, I'm have some issues getting it to run as a daemon process. Has anyone written a script yet for this?

Thanks again for your help.

**divreg** · 01-30-2012, 12:06 AM

I have it running as a daemon right now! In the first link I provided, that guy made a small script to run google-music manager as a daemon process.

1. Choose a directory to put your script. E.g.:

Code:

mkdir +p /opt/google

2. Create and edit a bash file and implement the daemon. One method:

Code:

cd /opt/google
nano googlemusicmanager.sh

and enter

Code:

#!/bin/bash
export DISPLAY=:2
Xvfb :2 -screen 0 1024x768x16 &
google-musicmanager -p mypassword &
x11vnc -display :2 -bg -nopw -listen localhost -xkb

where "mypassword" is either a) your google password or b) if you have 2-step verification, an application specific password (a 16-letter randomly generated string specific to your app).

3. Write it CTRL+o, and exit CTRL+x.

4. Next, make the script executable

Code:

chmod +x googlemusicmanager.sh

5. Run it:

Code:

./googlemusicmanager.sh

If you ssh'd in with the "-X" option, the GUI will show up on your client. This isn't what you want for a daemon. But if you ssh as you normally would (ssh google@192.168.1.105, in my case), the daemon will run in the background.

I hope this works for you!

Nobody has given feedback about getting everything up and running from the wiki/original post, did that also work for you?

Edit: This post has been edited to reflect using nano instead of vim so as to comply with standard VortexBox instructions.

**Ron Olsen** · 01-30-2012, 04:16 PM

Thanks for this info and for the wiki page. One suggestion: edit the above post and the wiki article to use nano as the text editor instead of vi. nano is a modeless editor, and is much easier to use for those unfamiliar with vi, which has a command mode and an insert mode.

Your instructions for vi are not entirely correct; you first have to get into insert mode by typing "i" before entering text.

**happygirl** · 01-31-2012, 07:19 PM

Aha! I've been sshing in with the -X option. That is my problem. When I was executing the ./googlemusic.sh (that is what I named my daemon) I kept getting a fatal server error. Your setup worked great for me. Thanks again so much for your help and the wiki!

**Macross** · 01-31-2012, 07:59 PM

Now all I want is a google music plugin for LMS. :P

**divreg** · 01-31-2012, 10:54 PM

Glad it worked for you happygirl! It's nice being on campus and having all my VB music on my G-nexus at my finger tips with lightning fast delivery.

**jimstolz76** · 04-17-2012, 10:20 PM

I've *almost* got this working 100%. If I do ssh -X google@vortexbox then I get the GUI from Google Music Manager and everything uploads just fine. If I log out of that ssh session, it stops. If I run the executable daemon script, I see MusicManager running in 'top', but it doesn't look like anything is uploading. As soon as I go back to ssh -X google@vortexbox and run google-musicmanager, it instantly starts uploading again.

The script is exactly what you have above and the password is correct. Any idea what I might have done wrong?