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To edit the playlist, i use my phone or a tablet or any other device that lets me reach the mpd server. I even can stream it to my phone when I am no home. https://www.musicpd.org/

You could technically run Plex on a VPS, but you would be better served with something like MPD for music only.

It's a shame musicpd doesn't get more attention. It's been around for ages and there are a bunch of clients (Mac, Windows, *NIX, Android, though strangely not iOS, and some web-based ones). I have it installed on my media centre box and also on a RPi in another room (which accesses the same music library over NFS). I can control the music from pretty much any computer in my house.

The clients are generally written for each platform, so don't suffer from the bloat of something like Electron. You can run it locally too, and quit the UI entirely without stopping music playing.

I'm talking data de-duplication searching tools,

Son, are you kidding me?

multi-monitor window managers,

What?

downloading / p2p tools,

Excuse me?

media players,

You fail it

media encoders

Wrong

etc.

Are you even trying?


In unrelated news, slashdot doesn't let me post this reply as-is, because it consists of too short lines, on average. Wtf. Fooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Transitioning from windows to linux I couldn't find a decent alternative to Winamp - XMMS and Beep just didn't cut it. I found them to be unpolished, ugly and XMMS skipped and stuttered atrociously. But I found mpd (music played daemon) and gmpc (gnome music player client) a really excellent, small and intuitive pair of programs to use - of course there are other clients for mpd, but gmpc is my first choice.

• mpd: http://www.musicpd.org/
• gmpc: http://www.musicpd.org/gmpc.shtml

sudo apt-get install mpd gmpc

Transitioning from windows to linux I couldn't find a decent alternative to Winamp - XMMS and Beep just didn't cut it. I found them to be unpolished, ugly and XMMS skipped and stuttered atrociously. But I found mpd (music played daemon) and gmpc (gnome music player client) a really excellent, small and intuitive pair of programs to use - of course there are other clients for mpd, but gmpc is my first choice.

• mpd: http://www.musicpd.org/
• gmpc: http://www.musicpd.org/gmpc.shtml

sudo apt-get install mpd gmpc

CD ripping: abcde. Easy to control and customize.

Text editor: vim Yes, it is bigger than, say, nvi. But on most any machine, it usually runs lightning fast.

Shell: zsh. Not one of the smallest CLI shells, but very capable and well-documented. In many ways, easier to use than any GUI shell (and much lighter compared to any GUI shell.)

Calculator: command-line wcalc

Finances: Ledger whips everything I have ever tried; I would never switch to a GUI program for this again.

Lists and databases: colon-delimeted plain text files. Search and get records with awk or grep. Quicker and easier than spreadsheets, and I could (should) easily encrypt them with GPG.

Nutrition tracking: see sig (immodestly)

Task tracking: todo.txt

Photo sorting: just use GNOME's Nautilus and folders; all the photo album apps seem to be too much trouble. Wrote a zsh script to pull photos from memory cards, rename them so I know what camera they came from, rotate them, and dump them into a hard-drive folder so I can sort them out.

Light doesn't always pay: I got tired of trying to configure Fluxbox and Gentoo; now I'm on GNOME and Ubuntu. Light also doesn't pay for things done infrequently, as light often comes with a bigger learning curve. I usually resort to GUI tools to, for example, add users to the system.

I wish I could find a good CLI audio player--full featured, but CLI. MPD seems to come closest, but it can't get me away from Amarok. Similarly, GNUpod is pretty good for ipods, but I move stuff in and out of my iPod fairly rarely so I found Amarok is just easier to use.

I'm afraid I don't know much about small form factor computers, so bear with me on this one...

Does anyone know if I'd be able to connect a USB hard drive and a USB soundcard and run musicpd on it? I just had to replace my MPD box with a big, ugly, old, but 10 dollar, dell. I really wouldn't mind a small quiet solution.

If you want network transparency and scripting, why the hell are you using windows? Use the right tool for the job and you'll find that there's no end of solutions. You might find you'd like the Music Player Daemon or MythTV. Or enable X forwarding and run Amarok across the network. Or just ssh in and use mplayer.

And if you're seriously set on using Windows for this, why not enable file sharing and let the network transfer your MP3s on the fly?

Anyway, to answer your question, you can do this with FTP Site commands. There's also a web API but I haven't used it.

I use the "music player daemon" to play my music, and it does great with my somewhat big (17,5k titles for 50 days straight listening) music collection, link here: http://www.musicpd.org/ . Memory usage at the moment (playing some FLACs...) is somewhere around 8MiB. You also have a ton of clients available, so you should be able to find one that suits your needs :-)

http://www.musicpd.org/ is wonderful.

I use MPD with QMPDClient, there are probably some visualisations available aswell but personally I don't use them.

I also use Amarok, altough it does have visualisations build in, I can't call it really lightweight.

For Linux/BSD, there are quite a few choices. AmaroK or JuK are the obvious one for KDE, and usually included in most distros. If you prefer Gtk applications, the best one out there is probably Quod Libet (I would not recommend Rhythmbox as it used to be rather slow and unstable). In the console, there's cmus for an iTunes-like ncurses interface, and plait if you prefer the good old command-line. Or you could go for client/server approach with mpd and its plethora of clients.

For Linux/BSD, there are quite a few choices. AmaroK or JuK are the obvious one for KDE, and usually included in most distros. If you prefer Gtk applications, the best one out there is probably Quod Libet (I would not recommend Rhythmbox as it used to be rather slow and unstable). In the console, there's cmus for an iTunes-like ncurses interface, and plait if you prefer the good old command-line. Or you could go for client/server approach with mpd and its plethora of clients.

Nice. For working with a music library, you might enjoy Music Player Daemon. There are a bunch of control clients for several platforms, including web-based clients, and command line clients (great for scriptability). The current CVS version also supports streaming, which is fun.

I usually use MPD (Music Player Daemon) on my Linux and NetBSD boxes so I can play audio remotely (or locally too). MPDv2 is suppose to support Windows, but it isn't out yet. Another trick that I've used for Linux/BSD -> Windows is that I ran a esound server (esd -public -tcp -port 6666) on the Windows computer and used mplayer (mplayer -ao esd) to send the audio output to the remote windows computer. It's very fun to send Avril Lavigne songs to the university's clusters' computers to piss off your hard working friends :).

Anyway, a quick google came up with PlayerPal, which runs on Windows and seems to be what you want. In fact, it seems to do a lot of things that MPD and its various clients do. Good luck.

I use Mac OS X and Linux at home, so some of this may not apply...

I wrote a script that rips a CD to properly tagged flac based on command line inputs of Artist, Genre, Year, Album Title and Mac OS X creating a /Volumes/CDName with "TrackNum TrackTitle.aiff" files using GraceNote CDDB. For compilations, soundtracks, etc., I also have some scripts that let me paste freedb.org web page data and retag everything in a given directory.

I store two identical copies of the flac on one of my desktop machines and a server, using rsync from desktop (where I rip or scp the rips) to server. The flac tree is artist/album/*.flac. I put an albumart.jpg (may soon allow for multiple jpgs, albumart*.jpg) in each album directory.

On the server, I use another script that takes as input the flac root, a list of album dirs to process, and the mp3 root. It checks file timestamps to only convert modified or new flac files to mp3. It converts filenames to something shorter with no spaces and populates the mp3 tree with artist-album/*.mp3. It decodes the flac and uses lame to encode MP3 at a command line specified bitrate & constant/variable flag. It populates all the id3v2 info in the mp3s it encodes, adds albumart, and runs mp3gain across each mp3 album subdirectory it writes files into.

The mp3 root is scanned every 300 seconds by mt-daapd, which shares the library out on my local network using Apple's proprietary protocol. iTunes clients pick it up. Mostly this is for the benefit of the guest room (old style) iMac, which has not the disk space for a collection, but is nice to provide guests with browsing, email, iTunes. My laptops maintain a live iTunes library since they do go with me at times. One of them puts all that data on my iPod.

I also have MPD running with its output going to a Griffin iMic USB audio card (GREAT electrical isolation from noisy components in the computer), into an amplifier with multi-room capability and an FM transmitter hanging off one of the tape outputs. By setting the inputs up properly and hooking up amps, I will eventually get time-synchronized output in my home theater, living room, and on the deck, as well as FM transmission to anything capable of receiving it on my property. There are many clients that can control MPD - it would be nice to use something like this to control it, but we'll see if it ever gets released and open sourced. I mostly like iTunes (except no FLAC support), but I'm not willing to have a user session open and sitting there just to play audio through my stereos - MPD is a much better solution, though I've not figured out a way to have a "carry it around" remote control for it.

My workflow is generally to use a laptop to rip the flac from the command line (though I'm building a CamelBones-based frontend for my wife to do it with a GUI) to local storage. I usually grab a large-size JPG from amazon.com while it's ripping, and copy it into the flac directory named albumart.jpg. I then scp the directory to the desktop machine according to my naming scheme where the "master" copy is. If I'm anxious, I can kick off the script that rsyncs then mirrors to mp3 manually, otherwise it just happens at the next scheduled interval. Once the mp3's are in place on the server, I just load them into my iTunes library - they show up under the mt-daapd share automatically. I've not figured out a way for automatic scanning on MPD, but since I'm not using that much it's not an issue at the moment.

yeah that Music Player Daemon, and a couple hundred gigs of flacs make a great home stereo box.

Some corrections...

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Sound Juicer ( http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juic er )

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MusicPD ( http://www.musicpd.org/ )

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Something went wrong after freenx.berlios.de...

http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) - Well made remote desktop solution, but no server for Windows atm.

21. Both PPTP and LT2P/Ipsec ones exist. Poptop ( http://www.poptop.org/ ) ...

When I was a student, I worked at different machines all day, and ssh'd into my dorm computer to do various things. I kinda wish I'd known about screen at that point, because I wouldn't have had to kill vim whenever I moved to another computer and forgot to shut it down on my dorm computer.

What I really could have used at the time was a D-BUS like method for instant messaging. I could just ls -lart the logs directory to see when I'd gotten my last message, and tail the newer logs to see what I'd been sent, but I couldn't respond without walking back there. Being able to do something like (not having ever used d-bus or DCOP or whatever, I'm making this up) dcop imer send bob_at_work "I'm stuck at the lab for another hour; I should be back around six." would have been terrifically useful.

Even more useful would have been connecting a basic IM client to an instance running on my computer, so I could have contiguous logs and whatnot.

Music Player Daemon seems like an interesting idea, but uses its own control architecture. What a pain it would be to do that for every application that one wanted to control remotely or from the command line.

--grendel drago

Mpd is a netgraph(4) based implementation of the multi-link PPP protocol for FreeBSD.

Music Player Daemon (MPD) allows remote access for playing music (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Mod, and wave files) and managing playlists.

You could use mpd and preset playlists.

Run a cron job at 15 before the hour - have the job be a client to the mpd and:

1. determine the time remaining on the current song vs. clock time and the playtime of the upcoming songs. It should be simple math to decide which song to play the station ID after.
2. monitor the mpd some more.
3. stop it when you reach that point.
4. save the playlist and the current position within it.
5. load the playlist with the station ID.
6. play it.
7. load the original playlist.
8. start playing at the corred position.
9. ?
10. PROFIT!

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.

So your free music is DRMed to death? You're also gonna have to pay to put your "free" tunes on a DAP? Free as in beer locked in a safe I guess.

I wonder if some day a company will offer DRM-less music. I'd be willing to pay for that. When I get locked into using a crappy player, can't transfer music to another machine (such as my media jukebox running MPD that is controlled from a web browser and plays on my stereos), and possibly lose all access to it if the company goes under, I'm just not willing to pay for that "privledge".

Like you I keep all of my original safe at home in the original jewel case. I ripped all of my CDs to FLAC using abcde (download it if it is not in ports it is only a shell script). FLAC is lossless so you will never have to rip your CDs when a better audio compression comes out. And it is simple to transcode FLAC to a more portable format like ogg:vorbis. All of the music is ripped and stored on a headless silent computer connected to my stereo. I control audio playback with Music Player Daemon. I also share the FLAC files (readonly) so that I can easily burn CDs and transcode from my workstation.

Things to watch out for: Some sound cards suck, most clip at higher volumes. When ripping CDs the various cddb sources are wrong as often as the data is correct. Verify all cddb results before ripping. The exception is the genre tag. That is almost always wrong. I strip the tag after ripping. For some reason one person's polka is another person's alternative.

I built a similar box (concept-wise) from spare parts laying around. I ended up with a Pentium 133, with 16 MB RAM, 6GB HDD (I don't have a lot of music), ISA soundcard (there was no onboard soundcard) and PCI network card. It runs Debian Linux, and uses mpd to do the work. It boots up in about two minutes to ncmpc, a client to mpd. It plays music rather nicely, and can live in the living room.

On my real (much faster) server, I run phpmp2, which provides a pretty web interface to the system. Running Apache in 16 MB just died.

While the cost of the whole thing was virtually nothing, there was time involved in setting it up. The box is a bit noisy, not terribly visually apealing, and the computer makes it impossible to watch a particular TV channel. However if you invest a bit more money or just have better spare parts laying around than I do, these shouldn't be a problem.

I built a similar box (concept-wise) from spare parts laying around. I ended up with a Pentium 133, with 16 MB RAM, 6GB HDD (I don't have a lot of music), ISA soundcard (there was no onboard soundcard) and PCI network card. It runs Debian Linux, and uses mpd to do the work. It boots up in about two minutes to ncmpc, a client to mpd. It plays music rather nicely, and can live in the living room.

On my real (much faster) server, I run phpmp2, which provides a pretty web interface to the system. Running Apache in 16 MB just died.

While the cost of the whole thing was virtually nothing, there was time involved in setting it up. The box is a bit noisy, not terribly visually apealing, and the computer makes it impossible to watch a particular TV channel. However if you invest a bit more money or just have better spare parts laying around than I do, these shouldn't be a problem.

I built a similar box (concept-wise) from spare parts laying around. I ended up with a Pentium 133, with 16 MB RAM, 6GB HDD (I don't have a lot of music), ISA soundcard (there was no onboard soundcard) and PCI network card. It runs Debian Linux, and uses mpd to do the work. It boots up in about two minutes to ncmpc, a client to mpd. It plays music rather nicely, and can live in the living room.

On my real (much faster) server, I run phpmp2, which provides a pretty web interface to the system. Running Apache in 16 MB just died.

While the cost of the whole thing was virtually nothing, there was time involved in setting it up. The box is a bit noisy, not terribly visually apealing, and the computer makes it impossible to watch a particular TV channel. However if you invest a bit more money or just have better spare parts laying around than I do, these shouldn't be a problem.

Check out MPD.
I have it running at home and I can control it through a web browser from wherever I happen to be. Permissions can be set by user, and playlist control is incredibly easy.

I searched for this same thing for a while for myself and tried a number of systems, and have stuck with MPD because it just works, always.

There seems to be a very active development community and a corresponding wealth of plugins. Plugins aimed at making playing music on a computer a better experience, not ones aimed at making your music player more eye-catching or fun to use.

If you share my feelings but are on linux instead, check out mpd and mpc.

I've been using MPD with phpMp for about 6 months now, and it's a great solution. It can play mp3, ogg, aac, flac, and I can control it through my laptop from anywhere in the house, or even over the net through ssh. It's nice to know that I can change the music playing in my house from another continent :).

This is very true. Sitting across the room from me, I have a 333 MHz Celeron (Pentium III version). It isn't really suited to using as a desktop system, so I have Apache and Music Player Daemon on it. With Apache I can serve up a small website or develop it from any computer on my network, and MPD lets me play music and control it from anywhere in the house. It's also just nice to be able to SSH home from school.

Old computers rock.

You'd have to find something else to rip, but Music Player Daemon is a pretty neat little player that has various front-ends (including a web-based one with an API). I use it at work to play music-on-hold over our telephone system, and it can be controlled from our intranet.

Not portable, but an old (P133, 96Mb RAM) toshi laptop which became all but useless for any meaningful work did, however, have a sound card and PCMCIA wi-fi fully supported by Linux 2.4.n. Add Music Player Daemon, samba, PHP and apache and connect via 1/8" stereo jack to your Hi-Fi. Then mount all your MP3's via samba, fire up the servers and use your new laptop or desktop system to set up playlists and pump your MP3's through your nice phat amp.

I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).

screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.

zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.

snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.

mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.

Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.

moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.

mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod

Or you can just use mpd, which supports most popular formats (MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC/MP4). Use kmp, phpmp, or mpc to control it depending on your mood (and whether or not you have X started).

Just one (non-infringing) example.