A LAN-based Democratic Jukebox?

Talez asks: "The environment I live in is pretty much communal and frequented by a few people. Sadly, none of us really agree that much on particular songs. What I'm trying to do is take a Linux box with a high quality soundcard and a bloody big hard drive and try to turn it into a democratic jukebox." Sounds like an interesting idea, and would be interesting to implement on a PC considering the variety of media out there (Vorbis, MP3, CDs and other digital audio formats). Has anyone looked into doing something like this? If this turns out to be a DIY solution, how would you do it?

"I'm trying to find the right combination of hardware and software to accomplish this. What I'm looking for is a system where we can bring up a page on the local LAN, and punch in a username, password and a rating for the song that is playing. Over time, the songs that have been rated higher by the people around the area will get played while the ones rated down won't get played that often. Also, if all of us say that a song -really- sucks, we can get it to skip the song.

While hardware is a matter of choice, I'd appreciate any experience people have had with different soundcards and high quality output. Also, all of us can code decent C, one of us has decent C++ skills and I can throw together semi-basic SQL queries. Is there any software out there that will fit the needs for this situation or at least provide an open source building block for us to go from?"

Comments

Echo

[TheDarkRogue]

I Hate to advertise and all, but there is something like what your looking for at http://www.Echo.Com. They Stream Music to you in a radio like way, except you get to vote to skip songs, and You also would rate the music. They have a good variety of songs, but it seems to take them a few weeks/months to get new releases. If you made a company station and just had everyone make and account and join that station. If you want it played from a central source, just hook the computer up to a sound system and have it play what ever the echo player is. The thing is that they would be able to listen to it themselves on whatever machine they were at as long as it had a soundcard.

On the note of hardware, I would use an SB Live. I Have one myself and love it. Greatest Sound Card I have ever owned.

Tunez

[jvhaarst]

http://tunez.sourceforge.net/
Gee, how hard can typing in "mp3 vote" in freshmeat really be.

Re:mserv

[Paul Carver]

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.