Building pianobar - Fedora 15

aspirin · #1 12th August 2011, 10:33 AM

The pianobar client is, from the author's description, "a free/open-source, console-based replacement for Pandora’s flash player." The official site is here: http://6xq.net/projects/pianobar/

I did not write pianobar; I just had some trouble installing the current version in Fedora 15 and thought it possible others might benefit from some straightforward guidance as I would have. The author does link to RPMs posted on GitHub, but those are out of date. I do not yet know how to build RPMs; as soon as I do, I will get some current ones posted somewhere online.

At the time of writing, the current version of pianobar is 2011.07.09. It is necessary to keep the client up-to-date because of Pandora's periodic changes to its service protocols.

One final note: I built pianobar in 32-bit Fedora 15. These instructions should work for 64-bit, but I can't guarantee that. Good luck!

Getting started

I have attached the package from GitHub because of problems with the number of links in this post; you can also get the source directly from the pianobar website, or navigate to the GitHub repo from there.

Required packages for build:

make
libao-devel
faad2-devel
libmad-devel

Required packages to run:

libao
faad2-libs

If you are already familiar with building projects from source, you now have all the information you need, so there's no need to keep reading.

If you are not familiar with building projects from source, you should definitely get that way as soon as possible! But these instructions will get pianobar running for you.

First, make sure you have all of the necessary packages for building and running pianobar:

Code:

sudo yum install make libao-devel faad2-devel libmad-devel libao faad2-libs

Assuming you got the g-zipped file from GitHub, extract it in a terminal using:

Code:

tar xzf PromyLOPh-pianobar-2011.07.09-9-g735752f.tar.gz

Change directories into the resulting directory:

Code:

cd PromyLOPh-pianobar-735752f

You can look, but there's no 'configure' file here, so just build by running:

Code:

make

If it finished without error, you should have a brand executable binary in the directory called 'pianobar'! Chances are you will want to be able to run pianobar regardless of your working directory, so install it:

Code:

sudo make install

You should be all set.

If there are obvious problems with this guide, or if it just doesn't work, I would love to know so I can fix it--please tell me!

PabloTwo · #2 13th August 2011, 03:40 AM

Nice program, works good. I hadn't heard of it until your post here. Installed it from the pianobar-2011.07.09.tar.bz2 package. Streaming music from pandora.com via the web browser flash driven interface, my cpu usage swings between 7%-11%. Using pianobar and streaming mp3, my cpu usage mostly sat at it's 1% idle with an occasional momentary bump to 2%.

The web browser interface uses much less bandwidth than pianobar, but the tradeoff is that the audio quality of the music is very much noticeably better in pianobar.

aspirin · #3 13th August 2011, 07:31 AM

Glad I could introduce you.

PabloTwo · #4 14th August 2011, 06:46 PM

I've built an rpm package of pianobar for Fedora. I probably should turn on the switch to build the libpiano.so.0.0.0 file also. Package includes files the tarball install doesn't install (i.e. the config file and the eventcmd-examples files).

Code:

BASH:~/-> rpm -ql pianobar
/usr/bin/pianobar
/usr/share/doc/pianobar-2011.07.09
/usr/share/doc/pianobar-2011.07.09/COPYING
/usr/share/doc/pianobar-2011.07.09/INSTALL
/usr/share/doc/pianobar-2011.07.09/README
/usr/share/man/man1/pianobar.1.gz
/usr/share/pianobar-2011.07.09/config-example
/usr/share/pianobar-2011.07.09/eventcmd-examples
/usr/share/pianobar-2011.07.09/eventcmd-examples/dmenu.pl
/usr/share/pianobar-2011.07.09/eventcmd-examples/eventcmd.sh
/usr/share/pianobar-2011.07.09/eventcmd-examples/rbot.rb
/usr/share/pianobar-2011.07.09/eventcmd-examples/scrobble.py
/usr/share/pianobar-2011.07.09/eventcmd-examples/scrobble.pyc
/usr/share/pianobar-2011.07.09/eventcmd-examples/scrobble.pyo

If you ever decide to learn to build rpm packages, PM me with your email addy and I'll send you the spec file.

koivth · #5 25th August 2011, 03:31 AM

Hey aspirin -

First of all I'd like to thank you very much for making this thread, I have been trying to install pianobar ever since I switched from Ubuntu (pianobar installation was a piece of cake...plus much more documentation) to Fedora 15.
I am a linux newbie and am not very comfortable with the command line yet (however, I am improving :]). I have unsuccessfully tried to build the rpm from source and was pretty much lost until I stumbled upon your post. I followed it exactly but ran into a problem with "make".
It returned :

Code:

duncan@laptop PromyLOPh-pianobar-735752f$ sudo make
c99 -O2 -DNDEBUG  src/main.o src/player.o src/settings.o src/terminal.o src/ui_act.o src/ui.o src/ui_readline.o src/ui_dispatch.o src/libpiano/crypt.o src/libpiano/piano.o src/libpiano/xml.o \
		src/libwaitress/waitress.o src/libezxml/ezxml.o -lao -lpthread -lm \
		-lfaad -lmad -o pianobar
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.6.0/../../../libfaad.so when searching for -lfaad
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.6.0/../../../libfaad.a when searching for -lfaad
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libfaad.so when searching for -lfaad
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libfaad.a when searching for -lfaad
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lfaad
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [pianobar] Error 1

What's wrong? I tried reinstalling the packages you listed at the beginning but that did not solve anything, and I cannot quite decipher what the error code means. I would appreciate any tips or advice you could give me!

leigh123linux · #6 25th August 2011, 08:30 AM

Post #1 is wrong

It doesn't require faad2-libs to build, it needs the headers files instead.

i.e faad2-devel

aspirin · #7 25th August 2011, 12:02 PM

koivth,

Thanks for the post. Leigh123linux is correct, I was wrong above. I have fixed the instructions to reflect what should be the correct method. Try installing faad2-devel and then building--that should give you no problem.

IIRC faad2-devel was installed as a dependency on my system, which is why it didn't register that it was necessary. I hope my mistake didn't cause you too much grief!

PabloTwo · #8 25th August 2011, 01:55 PM

Well, if you want to take the correction a bit further, from the spec file I made to build pianobar into an rpm...

Code:

BASH:~/-> cat files/specfiles/pianobar.spec | grep Requires
BuildRequires: libao-devel, faad2-devel, libmad-devel
Requires: libao, faad2-libs

Neither libxml2 or libxml2-devel is needed to build the code. libmad-devel is optional, if it's not present, it will build, but you loose the option to choose mp3 over the default accplus format.

aspirin · #9 28th August 2011, 09:47 PM

I did some looking, and found that libxml2 was required on older versions of pianobar, but is deprecated. Thanks for pointing it out. I have updated the original post.

koivth · #10 5th September 2011, 11:53 PM

Thanks for all of your help, guys! Successfully installed pianobar and it works great. My PC consistently runs about ten degrees cooler!

salemeni · #11 8th September 2011, 12:20 PM

Grear program,
Thank you.

java swing

elmulletlargo · #12 13th December 2011, 08:12 PM

Tried to install from source on Fedora 16, had all kinds of troubles.... turned out to be missing the devel files for gnutls....

yum install gnutls-devel

Then make was successful and I am up and running. And no more firefox crashing from flash problems!

Thanks for the prior help

PabloTwo · #13 13th December 2011, 08:27 PM

Yeah, I had missed the BuildRequires for gnutls-devel when I first started compiling pianobar. On a new install of F16 x86_64 a couple of days ago, that caught me also. My spec file is now properly updated.

Code:

BASH:~/-> grep Requires Documents/SpecFiles/pianobar.spec 
BuildRequires: libao-devel, faad2-devel, libmad-devel, gnutls-devel
Requires: libao, faad2-libs

Also, do not try to compile from the pre made .bz2 tarball file from the 6xq.net site. It's a bit lagging and will compile OK but pianobar will halt immediately with an error when you run it from that source code. Use only the .zip or .tar.gz source code download from the github site.

Quote:

The sourcecode can be downloaded at http://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar/ or
http://6xq.net/projects/pianobar/

elmulletlargo · #14 4th May 2012, 01:57 AM

Hey, just installed the latest version today which corrected an authentication change by Pandora..

Got a missing json error. Installed json-c-devel, now all is good.

PabloTwo · #15 4th May 2012, 02:21 AM

Yep, here's the new dep list for compiling:

BuildRequires: libao-devel, faad2-devel, libmad-devel, gnutls-devel
BuildRequires: glibc-headers, json-c-devel, libgcrypt-devel

Yet another log-in API change to thwart the "unofficial" third party pandora.com players. With this latest breakage of pianobar, Lars posted a patch file a few days ago that fixed the issue (I compiled it with the patch and it worked). But he's since changed to using a json API, which requires the new deps, and I'm now running a compile made from that.