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Well, I should say that I wanted to build a living room "jukebox" and DVR for parties, so my requirements might be a bit different from yours. I've used Mserv because I wanted a kiosk-type jukebox that would act like a real jukebox. That is, if no songs were selected, it would start picking songs based on ratings and how long it had been since they had last been played. I don't know of any other jukeboxes, Windows or Mac (perhaps someone can enlighten me) that will weight it's random selections like that. I wrote my own kiosk-style frontend using Python, but it appears that someone else has done the same thing with Shrill, complete with album art. I have a friend who's doing something similar with MPD, but I haven't used it myself. I've also played around with MythTV, which was nice because of the DVR features, but it didn't have the random feature that I wanted.

I use a modified version of mserv, a weighted-random online jukebox, with several separate userIDs; when away from the computer with my music on it, I use a MP3 CD player with some loosely themed CD-RWs.

According mserv's top 20 lists (of songs most likely to be played), it looks like I've biased the "personalities" as follows:

work: top-40-ish rock, trip-hop

games: metal, punk, heavier end of rock, techno

code (concentrated coding/deep hack mode): mostly 90s trance, some (particularly electronic) rock

smcv (general all-purpose setup): any of the above

satellite usenet

shouldn't take THAT long to fill 500GB with a continuous full usenet feed at 128k or 256k. maybe a week or two. More realistically, cron a binary harvester against localhost, expire articles every few days, and stream mp3's through your stereo using MServ to vote up and down individual tracks. Now THAT's what I call "the sounds of the Internet" :)

Even if you buy CDs, some of this is true...

I buy CDs. I have a sizeable pile of CDs behind my computer as I type this. I listen to CDs, when I want to listen to a whole CD end-to-end. The other 95% of the time, I listen to Ogg Vorbis versions of said CDs, and MP3s of (mostly unsigned) bands from mp3.com, because it's kinda hard to fit a 48-hour random playlist in a 3-CD changer, and impossible to set up a weighted random playlist (on the other hand, a slightly modified version of mserv, playing through the same mini hi-fi speakers, does this perfectly - I'll clean up my mserv patch for release sometime, but it basically just makes mserv play files with any of a configurable list of extensions rather than hard-coding .mp3 as the only option).

What I don't want to do is buy and listen to a crippled "CD" which I can only listen to as a single CD, and only if I don't use a computer or a decent CD-player to do so (and since my not-particularly-expensive CD player manages to play cheap unbranded CD-RWs, when audio CD players aren't meant to be able to cope with anything except CD-Rs and factory-made CDs, I'm not confident that it'd play deliberately-defective CDs very well). All my music's available to me as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis; 3 CDs at a time are available to me as CDs, and only if I want to ignore mp3.com. Put like that, it's pretty simple.

It's called Mserv. Works great, has a web interface, if you want it, or you can use telnet. You can also filter which songs the weighted random play will consider by date, genere, or whatever else is in the ID3 tag.

-Nathan

This is the program I mentioned in another post. Mserv does exactly what the original poster requested. I used the command line client and Penguin Power, a Linux X10 program, so that I could control playback and rate songs using an X10 wireless remote control. Much better than a web interface, IMHO, because the music can be controlled from a chair in the living room, or from the kitchen, or anywhere else.

Mserv has worked for me in the past. It has telnet and web interfaces and the latest CVS version supports Ogg as well as MP3.