Tangara setup
Documenting my Tangara music player setup.
I got my Tangara music player! cooltech.zone/tangara/ It takes an SD card or USB storage. I don’t have an SD card handy so will need to get one. Yes that’s a click wheel!
— Boris (@bmann.ca) December 21, 2024 at 3:25 PM
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Adventures in SD Cards and beets:
Ok got an SD card at Canadian Tire. Next, I have to get music files this is compatible with. Briefly messed around with bandcampsync python script (copy cookie and session values from dev tools in browser LOL) Guess I have to rethink music access again! Going to look at what Cloudron supports.
— Boris (@bmann.ca) December 22, 2024 at 2:36 PM
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beets
beets is a command line tool that Tangara recommends on their Music Librar page, their notes on beets copied here between the two lines:
Beets is a cross-platform command-line tool for organising your music collection. It handles normalising your directory structure and metadata formats, filling in missing metadata, and performing bulk operations on your collection. It also has a great ecosystem of plugins that extend its capabilities.
Once you've imported your collection into Beets, you can easily transcode anything in your library that can't be played by Tangara using the convert
:
convert:
embed: no
format: opus
You can then make a converted copy of your entire library using beet convert -d /path/to/sdcard
.
Note that beet convert
will not overwrite existing files. This makes it very easy to sync any newly added tracks to Tangara, by simply repeating the same conversion command.
Here's what my beets config (in ~/.config/beets/config.yaml
) looks like:
directory: /Volumes/TANGARA/Music
library: ~/iCloud/Documents/BeetsLibrary/tangaralibrary.db
import:
move: yes
The library is backed up and synched in my iCloud Drive, and the Volume is the mounted SD card.
I run it using this command:
beet import /path/to/music
Loading Music
The Ampache TinyHome Install details how I've shuffled files around, and I should have my entire library available there soon enough.
How best to synch / update to the Tangara is unclear. Beets can move stuff around and de-duplicate, and I can open the WebDAV interface on my Macbook and I guess have beets run over the network?
[!NOTE] I have to update my beets config, that import / move yes currently moves / deletes from the source. I can also add a convert command to go AAC -> OPUS or mp3 as needed.
Tangara Companion Firmware Updater
The Tangara Companion is on github. For MacOS, it's an unsigned release for x86 only, so you'll need to go into System Preferences > Security to allow it to run.
Once I got it to run, it never detected the Tangara when it was plugged in. Will have to check back on future releases.
More on flashing firmware on the Cooltech Zone site.
USB Block Storage
It looks like I need the new firmware update to get this working correctly, where I can just use a USB-C cable and plug it into my Macbook and it will mount. It does show as connected when I use a USB-C cable, and charges from my Macbook, but it doesn't mount.