Mopidy-InternetArchive

Mopidy-InternetArchive is a Mopidy extension for playing music from the Internet Archive.

This extension lets you search for and stream recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by Internet Archive users. It also gives you access to a vast number of high-quality live recordings from the Live Music Archive, and thousands of free audiobooks from the LibriVox collection.

Browsing the Internet Archive

If your Mopidy client supports browsing, there should be a top-level directory named Internet Archive. Beneath that, you will find the Internet Archive collections listed in internetarchive/collections, and you should be able to browse individual audio items (albums) and files (tracks) within these.

For practical and performance reasons, the number of items that will be shown within a collection is limited, e.g. you will not see all 167,967 audio items of the Live Music Archive 1. The default configuration sets this limit to 100, but this can be changed using internetarchive/browse_limit.

To allow browsing collections using different sort criteria, every collection provides a number of views, virtual subdirectories which let you browse the collection’s items by popularity, title, publish date, and so on. The default views are set up to resemble the archive.org Web interface, but can be changed at your own discretion with internetarchive/browse_views.

Searching the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive only supports searching for items, but not for individual files or tracks. Therefore, only albums will show up when searching in Mopidy. This also means that only album-related search fields are supported, so searching for track names or numbers will yield no results from the Internet Archive.

The number and ordering of search results returned from the Internet Archive can be changed with internetarchive/search_limit and internetarchive/search_order. Unless you explicitly specify an Internet Archive collection to search within, search scope will also be limited to the collections listed in internetarchive/collections.

Archive Favorites

If you have an Internet Archive account - also termed a Virtual Library Card - you can access your Archive Favorites from Mopidy. To do so, you just need to add the identifier of your favorites collection to internetarchive/collections. Typically, the identifier is fav-{username}, but you should be able to figure it out from the archive.org Web site. When added to internetarchive/collections, you will be able to browse and search your Archive Favorites just like the other collections listed there.

Footnotes

1

As of Jan. 9, 2017.