Music bots for your Mumble voice chat server

2023-01-28 00:00:00

Say you have a Mumble server, but you’d like to play audio from youtube videos in the background while talking to your friends. Discord users may be used to using Rhythm for that purpose. This experience can be replicated in Mumble as well.

The most complete list of bots can be found on Mumble wiki’s “3rd Party Applications” page, where you’ll find the likes of botamusique, JJMumbleBot etc. Up until now, I’ve used botamusique, so this is the bot I’m going to talk about further on.

botamusique

Repo link

Botamusique supports playing audio from yt videos, online radio stations and local audio files. Unlike Rhythm, botamusiqe always sits in only one Mumble channel.

The bot can be controlled with:

Mumble chat commands, for example: !yt [link to yt video]
Web UI
It’s disabled by default and can be enabled in configuration.ini, which I cover later

I strongly prefer the web UI. I keep forgetting the chat commands.

Docker

Docker instructions

If you need multiple music bots - for example, one in Mumble channel A and another in channel B - you need to start multiple containers.

Useful configuration changes

My usecase is that me and my friend control the bot form the web UI - it’s more comfortable than the chat commands for us. The UI is exposed to the Internet and secured with username and password (configurable in botamusique settings).

Some configuration.ini properties you may want to change are:

[bot]
max_track_duration = 180       # Allow playing YouTube videos longer 60 minutes
when_nobody_in_channel = pause # Pause playback if nobody in channel
announce_current_music = False # Don't announce video title in chat when starting to play it

[webinterface]
enabled = True                 # Explicitly enable webinterface - it's disabled by default
listening_addr = 0.0.0.0
#listening_port = 8181         # Leave at default
auth_method = password         # Show built-in browser password prompt when connecting to web UI
user = myuser                  # tip: To avoid typing in these credentials all the time,
password = mypassword          #      bookmark your web UI URL like this:
                                #      http://myuser:mypassword@[your ip or domain name here]:port

There are many more settings - see here for the full config reference

Using the web UI

The web UI is a bit confusing at first.

How do I play a video from yt url?

Scroll/look all the way down at a tile titled “Add URL” with the label “Add Youtube or Soundcloud URL” - paste the URL there and click “Add URL”. The video will start downloading and will start playing shortly.

What’s this “Music Library” grey block?

This section is confusing because it doesn’t display anything by default. You need to click the “File”, “URL”, “Radio” buttons for it to start showing anything.

Selecting the “URL” button will show the history of videos you’ve played using the “Add URL” section.

Is there dark mode?

Press the lightbulb icon in the bottom right corner of your browser window.

Uploading audio files

Anybody with access to the web UI can upload audio files to your filesystem.
This is useful when your friends want to play an obscure song that’s not on yt.
They can use the “Upload File” section.

There’s a default max 30MB upload limit - you can change it in configuration.ini