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

Re:One Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

...these ratings in a big file, let's say 'ratings.txt'. This file can have 1 line per song, and have a list of ratings after it. So if you have 5 people, and you only have 2 ratings (0=hate it, 1=like it) it might look like this: Stairway_to_Heaven.mp3 0 1 0 1 1

Dude, that plain text is dying for some XML. I'm thinking all you need is the filename because you'd get the rest from an ID3.

<song filename="Stairway_to_Heaven.ogg">
<user name="tom">awful</user>
<user name="dick">awful</user>
<user name="harry">awful</user>
</song>

Re:on sound cards...

[_typo]

If you're encoding at 128kbps *maybe*, but lame's vbr (r3mix.net) settings give cd quality which is certainly not a bottleneck for your audio. Your soundcart will be.

I still don't know why soundcards still exist in their current form. Computer cases are horrible environments, full of noise and static.

Motherboards manufacturers should just agree on a standard digital header for audio and then Creative/etc would just make external Digital-Analog converters.

Of course you CAN already do this with USB audio and with soundcards with digital output, but why even bother with having a full blown soundcard in your PC when a good DSP plus an external converter will do a much better job?