The most advanced broadcasting bot for GrooveShark.

GrooveCaster is a completely standalone, headless, fully automatic and unmanaged broadcasting bot for the music streaming service GrooveShark, written in C# and powered by the SharpShark library.

GrooveCaster will automagically manage your broadcast by never letting it run out of songs, taking care of all the hassle that's needed for maintaining it manually.

Additionally, it provides a variety of management features, either via it's web-based management interface, or in the form of chat commands in the broadcast itself, allowing for unattended access by users of your community.

Moreover, GrooveCaster provides an advanced module system, which allows users to very easily introduce completely new functionality (or modify existing one) .

Finally, GrooveCaster is completely standalone and headless, which means that you can run it on almost any piece of hardware without the need for a graphical output (even on Linux servers using Mono!). Additionally, an ASP.NET package is provided if you want to run it on IIS or Azure.

Note:
While using GrooveCaster you shouldn't be using GrooveShark with the same account that's used for broadcasting, as in doing so you might cause several issues, both for yourself and your listeners.

Note:
GrooveCaster is still at an early stage of development, so some features may still be incomplete or not fully functional. If you come across any issues, don't hesitate to let me know by opening a new issue in the bugtracker for this project.

For ease-of-use, pre-built binary distributions of GrooveCaster will be available for download on each release. However, if you want to build GrooveCaster yourself, you can clone this repository locally and build using Visual Studio 2013.

Latest Release: 1.3.1.0

Windows Binaries: Download
ASP.NET Package: Download
Mono Binaries: Download

There's no installation required.
Simply download the binaries archive from the links above, and extract them at some location on your drive.

If you wish to upgrade GrooveCaster, simply download the latest archive, delete all previous files (except for gcaster.sqlite and gcaster.stats.sqlite), and extract the fresh archive in the same directory.

If you want to run GrooveCaster on a Windows environment you first need to make sure you have .NET Framework 4.5 installed. If you don't already have it installed, make sure to grab it from here.

Afterwards, running GrooveCaster is as simply as double clicking GrooveCaster.exe and following the instructions on how to perform the initial setup.

If you get an error about URI reservations, you can try running GrooveCaster as an administrator, and if that doesn't help you will need to follow the on-screen instructions.

GrooveCaster doesn't currently support being ran as a service, however you could run it in daemon mode by specifying the -d parameter:

> GrooveCaster.exe -d

After GrooveCaster has started you should be able to access it's web interface at http://localhost:42278.

GrooveCaster can run under IIS or Windows Azure as an ASP.NET application. For ease-of-use, a pre-built package is provided.

Here's how you can run GrooveCaster under IIS (version >= 7.5 required with ASP.NET 4.5 enabled).

First of all, you need to extract the GrooveCaster ASP.NET package you downloaded at a folder of your preference.

After you've done that, open the IIS Manager, and add a new website with the name GrooveCaster (or anything else you like), and point its content directory to the directory you just extracted the ASP.NET package. Make sure to untick the Start Website immediately option.

After you've done that, you need to configure the application pool for GrooveCaster.

In order to do that, click on the Application Pools tab present in the left navigation bar, find the GrooveCaster application pool, right click it, select Advanced Settings, and change the following options:

• Enable 32-Bit Applications: True
• Start Mode: Always Running
• Idle Time-out (minutes): 0

After you've done that, make sure to stop and re-start the application pool.

Finally, go back to the Sites tab, right-click the GrooveCaster website, go to Manage Website and then Advanced Settings, and change the following options:

• Preload Enabled: True

You can now start the GrooveCaster website and access it from your web browser.

In Unix-based environments, GrooveCaster requires a framework called Mono.

Depending on your platform, you can find instructions on how to install Mono on the project's website.
After you've finished installing Mono, the rest is pretty much the same.

Simply open up your terminal, go to the folder you extracted GrooveCaster in, and launch it using the -d parameter (it's required for Linux/OSX environments):

$ mono GrooveCaster.exe -d

In Unix-based environments you can run GrooveCaster as a service, using the supervisor software.
The following instructions underline how to install, configure, and use supervisor in an Ubuntu machine.

First, install supervisor by executing the following command in your terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install supervisor

Then, create a new supervisor configuration file for GrooveCaster:

$ sudo touch /etc/supervisor/conf.d/groovecaster.conf

Then edit the contents of that configuration file with your favorite text editor:

[program:groovecaster]
command=/usr/bin/mono GrooveCaster.exe -d
user=youruser
stderr_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/groovecaster.err
stdout_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/groovecaster.log
directory=/groovecaster/directory/

Of course, you will need to replace youruser with the username of the user you want to run GrooveCaster under, and /groovecaster/directory/ with the directory where you extracted GrooveCaster.

You should also verify the location of the mono executable by running:

$ whereis mono

If you see /usr/bin/mono in there, there's nothing to worry about. Otherwise, simply update the configuration file to reflect the location of the mono executable (for instance it could be /usr/local/bin/mono).

After you're done with all that start the control manager of supervisor:

$ sudo supervisorctl

Update the configuration, and launch GrooveCaster:

$ supervisor>update
$ supervisor>start groovecaster

After GrooveCaster has started you should be able to access it's web interface at http://localhost:42278.

When launching GrooveCaster you can explicitly specify the host the web interface will bind to.

By default, GrooveCaster will bind to http://localhost:42278.

You can change that behavior by specifying the -b command-line parameter:

> GrooveCaster.exe -b http://localhost:1234

After you've successfully installed GrooveCaster you will have to set it up for use.

In order to do that, you first need to login to the admin dashboard by accessing the web interface which, by default, will be available at http://localhost:42278.

The default credentials are admin as a username and admin as a password.

After you've successfully logged in, you'll be presented with the setup wizard, where you will be required to setup your GrooveShark account, as well as the details of your broadcast.

Once you've finished the setup wizard you will be redirected to the admin dashboard, from where you can manage the settings of the bot, your song collection, special guests, and additional users with access to the admin dashboard.

It is recommended that the first thing you do is change the password of the admin account.
To do that, simply click the Settings link, located at the top right corner of the dashboard, and provide your current password (admin), and your new desired password.

Now that your account is secured you will need to add songs to your collection.
GrooveCaster will not start broadcasting until there's at least 2 songs in your collection.

For more instructions on how to add songs to your collection see Song Management.

You might also want to add yourself as a special guest via the Guest Management page.

The overview page provides a quick overview of the current status of GrooveCaster and your broadcast.

This dashboard also provides you with information about the currently playing song, the number of listeners your broadcast had in the past 24 hours, the upcoming songs in your queue, some basic queue management functions, and a chat box which you can use to interact with your listeners.

GrooveCaster currently only keeps track of the last 20 chat messages.

Note
Most information information doesn't update automatically currently, so you will have to refresh the page to see changes.

The queue management page provides detailed information about the queue of your broadcast.

From this page you can really easily manage your queue, by adding or removing songs, moving them in the queue, or directly skipping to them.

Additionally, you are provided with the option to completely empty the queue, by clicking on the Empty Queue button.

Moreover, you can load a playlist into your broadcast by clicking on the Load Playlist button, which will make GrooveCaster automatically load songs from that playlist (either in their normal order, or shuffled).

If a playlist is already running, you can disable it by clicking on the Disable button.

For more information about playlist management, refer to Playlist Management.

The guest management page provides a detailed listing of users with special guest permissions, while also allowing you to edit/delete them, add new guests, and import guests.

To add a new guest, click on the Add Guest button, and fill in the required fields in the page you'll be presented with.

You can easily search for a user via the provided search-bar, which will automatically provide suggestions when you start typing a users name. However, if you're not sure you've found the correct user, have them join your broadcast and type !ping in chat (while having the ping module enabled). GrooveCaster will respond with a message containing their User ID, which you can then use in this page.

The User Name field is only for personal reference, and doesn't have to match the username of the GrooveShark user.

Clicking on the Channel Permissions button you will be presented with a choice of toggle-able special guest permissions that are granted to the user.

The default selections will give the user suggestion approval/rejection permissions, and the permission to ban/unban users from the broadcast.

For ease of use, GrooveCaster provides the option to import all the users your GrooveShark account follows as special guests.

In order to do that, simply click on the Import Followed Users button in the Guest Management page.

The song management page provides a detailed listing of the local collection of songs GrooveCaster will use to automatically fill the queue.

From this page you can also remove songs from the collection, add new songs, and import songs from a GrooveShark collection.

Adding songs is really straight forward.

Simply click on the Add Song button present in the Song Management page, and use the search box in order to find the song you'd like to add.

Upon clicking on a song suggestion from the search box the song details fields will be automatically populated.

Do not edit those fields manually unless you really know what you're doing.

After you've found and selected the song you'd like to add, simply click on the Add button to add the song to the collection.

GrooveCaster provides the ability to very easily and automatically import songs from the collection of a GrooveShark user.

To do so, simply click on the Import from GS Collection button present in the Song Management page, find the user whose collection you want to import using the search box, and click on the Import button.

By default, the User ID field will contain the ID of the current broadcast user (the user you set up GrooveCaster with).

Normally, GrooveCaster only imports songs from the users collection. If you also want to import songs from the users favorites (or only from the favorites), you can use the provided checkboxes to specify your preference.

Collection importing might take some time, so don't worry if you don't see any immediate progress.

The playlist management page provides a listing of locally available playlists, which can be used for maintaining more control over the queue.

From this page you can also remove existing playlists, or import playlists from a GrooveShark user.

GrooveCaster provides the ability to very easily import song playlists from another GrooveShark user.

To do so, simply click on the Import GS Playlists button present in the Playlist Management page, find the use whose playlists you want to import using the search box, and then choose the ones you need from the options that will be presented to you.

You can either import all playlists at once, by clicking on the Import all Playlists button (present at the bottom of the playlist list), or individually, by clicking the Import button next to each playlist.

One thing you should note is that GrooveCaster will automatically add songs that are in imported playlists to your collection (if they don't already exist).

Playlist importing might take some time, so don't worry if you don't see any immediate progress.

The module management page provides a detailed listing of available modules, while also allowing editing, enabling, disabling, or removing them, as well as creating entirely modules.

For more information about modules, refer to the Module System.

The core settings page provides the ability to modify some core settings of GrooveCaster.

Currently available settings are:

The user management page provides a detailed listing of users with access to the GrooveCaster administration dashboard.

Such users can only access the Overview, Guest Management, and Song Management pages.

GrooveCaster provides a really powerful management interface via the default GrooveShark chat.

Using a set of commands, listeners with special guest permissions can remotely manage the broadcast, greatly reducing the hustle of personally maintaining it.

By default, all users who are added as a Special Guest from the admin dashboard, have guesting permissions in the broadcast itself. However, some commands are only available to users with the required flags.

All commands start with the specified command prefix (defaults to !). You can configure command execution from the Core Settings page in order to allow only active guests to use commands.

Currently, all commands are implemented in the form of modules you can selectively enable. For more information about available commands refer to the module system.

GrooveCaster also provides a very powerful module system which allows users to implement custom functionality, modify, or built on-top of existing one.

All GrooveCaster modules are simple Python scripts (using IronPython syntax), and can be directly managed from the Administration Dashboard.

All changes to modules are being propagated immediately, requiring no code recompilation or restarts.

By default, GrooveCaster comes with several toggle-able built-in modules which provide custom commands for the chat interface.

The default commands are the following:

For more details on how to implement your own modules, sample modules, and documentation on the available APIs, please refer to the Wiki.

This is a list of features and fixes that are currently being worked on:

• More statistics!
• Automatic service installation on Windows

GrooveCaster is an open-source project, available for everyone to use and modify.

If you want to implement a new feature, modify an ex isting one, fix a bug, or anything else, feel free to fork this respository and send me a pull request.

Approved contributions will get added to the master branch, shipped in the next binary release, and contributors will be listed below.

Contributors:

• Orfeas Zafeirs (author)