Overview

Wagtail uses a client/server process with clients sending files to the server to be encoded. You can have multiple client machines but only one server machine. A single machine can be both a client and a server.

The configuration files supplied have sensible defaults in that they're my own settings. To use them you must have the programs listed in the requirements sections below. You can, of course, use completely different programs if you alter the relevant configuration files. Configuration files are stored in /etc/wagtail/

Server

Requirements

Installation

  1. Download wagtail-0_4.tar.gz
  2. Unpack with tar xvfz wagtail_0-4.tar.gz
  3. cd wagtail_0-4
  4. Install with make install_server

Configuration

  1. Set the host field in queue.conf to the name of the machine which receives files (almost always the hostname of the server machine)
  2. I store my audio files under /media/audio/ and use /media/audio/queue/ as my queue directory. You should create these directories or alter the relevant fields in task.conf (first line), wagenc.conf and queue.conf

Client

Requirements

Installation

  1. Download wagtail-0_4.tar.gz
  2. Unpack with tar xvfz wagtail_0-4.tar.gz
  3. cd wagtail_0-4
  4. Install with make install_client

Configuration

  1. Set the host field in client.conf to the hostname of the server
  2. Set the dev field in cd.conf to the device name of your CD-ROM

Running

  1. On the server start wagenc
  2. On the client run wagdisc to rip a disc or wagfile to add one or more files to the collection

Recommended steps

The instructions above will give you a working Wagtail setup based on the configuration files as supplied. The steps in this section are those not strictly required, but which you may find useful.

Server

Install id3comtool to allow multiple fields to be stored in a single MP3 ID3 comment tag. The default format.conf file has commented out lines under the mp3 section which use this tool.

Install Vorbis tools to allow use of the Ogg/Vorbis encoder. There are commented out entries in the default format.conf for Ogg/Vorbis files. You may also wish to change the 'stream' definition in class.conf to use the vorbis format rather than mp3.

The 'stream' task in task.conf has a commented out line referencing 'normalize'. To enable volume normalisation for this task, uncomment this line and install normalize.

Client

The Wagfile client program sends arbitrary files to the server to be encoded. Wagfile can pre-load details about the selected files if programs exist on the client machine to read file meta-data. I strongly recommend installing the appropriate packages on the client as well as the server for audio types that you frequently use, i.e. id3lib and id3comtool for mp3 files, metaflac for FLAC files and vorbiscomment for Ogg/Vorbis files.