MRVN

MRVN is a Discord music player bot. It has a few neat features:

• Supports a wide array of sites, including Youtube, Soundcloud, Twitch and many more. Sites can be blocked, and the default search site can be configured.
• Exclusively uses Discord application commands.
• Multi-channel support: allows simultaneous playback in multiple channels by using multiple bot applications.
• Per-user queues: your queued songs follow you between channels. Each bot alternates between songs queued by people in the channel, so nobody misses out.

Commands

• /play [query or url] adds a song to your queue and starts playback in the channel if required.
• /pause pauses the current song playing your voice channel.
• /play unpauses the current song, or makes the bot start playing if you have previously queued songs.
• /skip skips the current song, or votes to skip if it you weren't the original queue-er. The number of votes needed is configurable.
• /stop skips the current song and doesn't play any more queued songs. Use /play to continue playback.
• /replace replaces your most recently queued song.
• Queue management is not implemented yet.

Set up

MRVN is self-hosted. This means you must register your own Discord applications and run the bot on your own system. It's written in Rust and runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. You can build MRVN yourself or use our prebuilt Docker images, but either way you must set up the Discord application first:

Creating the Discord Applications

1. Open the Discord Developer Portal and create an application for each channel you want to be able to play simultaneously. E.g. if your guild has three voice channels, you might want three applications to be able to listen to music in all channels at the same time.
2. Ensure you create a Bot user for each application. You can do this from the "Bot" panel in the application settings.
3. Download a copy of the config.example.json file and save it somewhere, maybe as config.json. This file contains your configuration for the bot, including Discord application tokens.
4. Open the new config.json file and add the bot token and application ID for each Discord application. The "command bot" is the one that has application commands registered against it. It can be one of the voice bots, but you must also include it in the voice bot list.
5. Add each bot user to your Discord guild:
   • Visit the following URL to add the command bot, replacing APPLICATION_ID_HERE with the bots application ID: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=APPLICATION_ID_HERE&scope=bot%20applications.commands&permissions=3145728
   • Visit the following URL to add each non-command bot, again replacing APPLICATION_ID_HERE with the bots application ID: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=APPLICATION_ID_HERE&scope=bot&permissions=3145728
   • The different between these is because the command bot needs to request extra permissions to create application commands.

Run the Docker image (recommended)

Before running, ensure you have the Docker Engine installed.

Once that's done, you can run the following command any time you want to start MRVN. Make sure to replace /path/to/config.json with the path to your configuration file saved previously.

docker run --name mrvn-bot --rm --mount type=bind,source=/path/to/config.json,target=/config.json ghcr.io/cpdt/mrvn-bot:latest

You can stop MRVN by running docker stop mrvn-bot.

Build and run locally

This is an alternative to running the Docker image as described above. I would recommend you follow those instructions as they involve less setting up, but you're welcome to build and run MRVN yourself.

First off you need to setup your environment:

1. Ensure you have the required dependencies installed:
   • Git
   • Rustup
   • youtube-dl
   • FFmpeg
2. Clone the repository by running git clone https://github.com/cpdt/mrvn-bot

Once that's done, you can run the following command from inside the repository any time you want to start MRVN. Make sure to replace /path/to/config.json with the path to your configuration file saved previously.

cargo run --release /path/to/config.json

The first time this runs it will build MRVN, which can take a while. After it's been built once it should start immediately.

If you want to see logging output, set the RUST_LOG environment variable to mrvn before running the above command. This uses the syntax from the env-logger library.

You can stop MRVN by pressing Ctrl+C in the terminal window.

Why?

In mid-2021 Groovy and Rythm, Discord’s two largest music bots, were taken offline by YouTube. In the wake of this, I created MRVN mainly to serve a couple of servers I’m in, but also as an open tool for anyone looking for a new music bot.

Unlike Groovy, Rythm and many like them, MRVN was designed from the ground up to be self-hosted and simple to setup, making it impossible to be taken down as a whole. As open source software MRVN also does not charge its users, following the most notable clause in YouTube’s terms of service that commercial music bots break.

Finally, as a personal project MRVN has been an opportunity for me to re-think how my friends and I use music bots. This has led to what I consider improvements over the old formula: playing songs in a round-robin pattern so everybody gets a go, handling servers with multiple voice channels with a breeze, and codifying the unspoken “you shall not skip a song that is not yours” rule.

Please reach out and let me know if you’re using MRVN on your server! I would love to hear what works and what doesn’t, and see how it’s being used “in the wild”.

License

MRVN is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for details.

The MRVN smiley face used in this document is sourced from the Titanfall Wiki and is copyright Respawn Entertainment 2014.