I’ve been a Spotify customer for quite long time but recently realized that I wasn’t using it enough to justify 10 quid per month. Amazon made a great offer for 4 months subscription for only £0.99 and I’m trying that out now but the quality of the service didn’t impress so far. Then it dawned on me: I already have lots of MP3s from my old archives, I have a fast internet connection and I have a Synology. Why not just build my own streaming?

One device to rule them all: Synology

Everyday I’m growing more fond of my Synology and regretting for all that time I haven’t utilized it fully.

For streaming audio, we need the server and client software. The server side comes with Synology: Audio Station

The Server

Using Synology Audio Station is a breeze. You simply connect to Synology over the network and copy your albums into the music folder. Try to have a cover art named as “cover.jpg” so that your albums shows nicely on the user interface.

The Client

Synology has a suite of iOS applications which are available in the Apple App Store. The one I’m using for audio streaming is called DS Audio.

By using Synology’s Control Panel you can use a specific user for listening to music only. This way even if your account is compromised the attacker will only have read-only access to your music library.

Connecting to the server

There are two ways of connecting to your server:

1. Dynamic DNS
2. Quick Connect (QC)

Dynamic DNS is a builtin functionality but you’d need a Synology account. Basically your Synology pings their server so that it can detec the IP changes.

QC is the way I chose to go with. It’s a proprietary technology by Synology. The nice thing about QC is when you are connected to your local network it uses the internal IP so it doesn’t use mobile data. When you’re outside it uses the external IP and connects over the Internet.

Features

• You can download all the music you want from your own library without any limitations. There’s no limit set for manual downloads. For automatic downloads you can choose from no caching to caching everything or choose a fixed size from 250MB to 20GB.
• When you’re offline you don’t need to login. On login form there’s a link to Downloaded Songs so you can skip logging in and go straight to your local cache.
• You can pin your favourite albums to home screen.
• Creating a playlist or adding songs to playlists is cumbersome (on iPhone at least):
  • Select a song and tap on … next to the song
  • Tap Add. This will add your song to the play queue.
  • Tap on Play button on top right corner.
  • Tap playlist icon on top right corner.
  • Tap the same icon again which is now on top left corner to go into edit mode
  • Now tap on the radio buttons on the left of the songs to select.
  • When done, tap on the icon on the bottom left corner. This will open the Add to Playlist screen (finally!)
  • Here you can choose an existing playlist or create a new one by clicking + icon.

Considering how easy this can be done on Spotify client this really needs to be improved.

• In the library or Downloaded Songs sections, you can organise your music by Album, Artist, Composer, Genre and Folder. Of course in order for Artist/Composer/Genre classification to work you have to have your music properly tagged.
• The client has Radio featue which has builtin support for SHOUTCast

• You can rate songs. There’s a built-in Top Rated playlist. By rating them you can play your favourite songs without needing them to be added to playlists which is a neat feature.

Conclusion

I think having full control over my own music is great and even though DS Audio client has some drawbacks it’s worth it as it’s completely free. Also you can just set it up as a secondary streaming service in addition to your favourite paid one just in case so that you have a backup solution.

Resources

• Synology Blog: QuickConnect, Quickly Explained

Nowadays many people use their phones as their primary web browsing device. As mobile usage is ubiquitous and increasing even more, testing the web applications on mobile platforms is becoming more important.

Chrome has a great emulator for mobile devices but sometimes it’s best to test your application on an actual phone.

If your application is the default application you can access via IP address you’re fine but the problem is if you have multiple domains you want to test at some point you’d need to enter the domain name in your phone’s browser.

Today I bumped into such an issue and my solution involved one of my favourite devices in my household: Synology DS214Play

Local DNS Server on Synology

Step 01: First, I installed DNS Server package by simply searching DNS and clicking install on Package Center.

Step 02: Then, I opened the DNS Server settings and created a new Master Zone. I simply entered the domain name of my site which is hosted on IIS on my development machine and the local network IP address of the Synology as the Master DNS Server.

Step 03: Next, I needed to point to the actual web server. In order to do that I created an A record with the IP address of the local server a.k.a. my development machine.

Step 04: For all the domains that my DNS server didn’t know about (which is basically everything else!) I needed to forward the requests to “actual” DNS servers. In my case I use Google’s DNS servers so I entered those IPs as forwarders.

Step 05: At this point the Synology DNS server is pointing to the web server and web server is hosting the website. All is left is pointing the client’s (phone or laptop) DNS setting to the local DNS server.

Step 06: Now that it’s all setup I could access to my development machine using a locally-defined domain name from my phone:

Conclusion

Another simple alternative to achieve this on Windows laptops is to edit hosts file under C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc folder but when you have multiple clients in the network i.e macbooks and phones, it’s simpler just to point to the DNS server rather than editing each and every single device. And also it’s more fun this way!

Resources

• How to set up your domain with Synology DNS Server
• Set Up a Local DNS with Synology DiskStation

I like playing around with PDFs especially when planning my week. I have my daily plans and often need to merge them into a single PDF to print easily. As I decided to migrate to Mac for daily use now I can merge them very easily from command line as I described in my TIL site here.

Mac’s PDF viewer is great as it also allows to simply drag and drop a PDF into another one to merge them. Windows doesn’t have this kind of nicety so I had to develop my own application to achieve this. I was planning to ad more PDF operations but since I’m not using it anymore I don’t think it will happen anytime soon so I decided to open the source.

Very simple application anyway but hope it helps someone save some time.

Implementation

It uses iTextSharp NuGet package to handle the merge operation:

public class PdfMerger
{
    public string MergePdfs(List<string> sourceFileList, string outputFilePath)
    {
        using (var stream = new FileStream(outputFilePath, FileMode.Create))
        {
            using (var pdfDoc = new Document())
            {
                var pdf = new PdfCopy(pdfDoc, stream);
                pdfDoc.Open();
                foreach (string file in sourceFileList)
                {
                    pdf.AddDocument(new PdfReader(file));
                }
            }
        }

        return outputFilePath;
    }
}

Also uses Fluent Command Line Parse, another of my favourite NuGet packages to take care of the input parameters:

var parser = new FluentCommandLineParser<Settings>();
parser.Setup(arg => arg.RootFolder).As('d', "directory");
parser.Setup(arg => arg.FileList).As('f', "files");
parser.Setup(arg => arg.OutputPath).As('o', "output").Required();
parser.Setup(arg => arg.AllInFolder).As('a', "all");
    
var result = parser.Parse(args);
if (result.HasErrors)
{
    DisplayUsage();
    return;
}

var p = new Program();
p.Run(parser.Object);

The full source code can be found in the GitHub repository (link down below).

Resources

• Source Code
• TIL: Combining PDFs on Mac