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Streaming MP3s on Demand?
The Human Cow asks: "My computer teacher lets us listen to music while we code, but the 150 MB network drive limit kind of puts a damper on the variety of music I have access to. CDs and MP3 players are too much of a hassle to keep up with, so I started wondering if there was any way to set up a streaming radio station that was controllable from a remote PC. I looked at Shoutcast again to see if there was some option that I missed, but I didn't find much. Not having any luck on Google, I've decided to turn to you guys. Does anybody know of a program that'll let me set up a playlist at home and then remotely control it from school? Streaming MP3s on demand, maybe?"
I most say, I have never used it, but I did hear it's good. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/
Does anybody know of a program that'll let me set up a playlist at home and then remotely control it from school? Streaming MP3s on demand, maybe?
I'm not sue your school will appreciate the bandwidth costs of 128kbps or more for several hours a day.
A better solution might be a hard-disk based mp3 player; until my Archos crapped out on me (frightfully bad Quality Assurance from Archos) I'd had 55 Gigabytes of music literally in my hand.
For now I'm making do with a Zaurus and a 512 Megabyte SD card -- which is still quite a bit larger than your school's entire hard drive --, and lets me carry around three Gilbert & Sullivan operas, a Sondheim compilation album, and half a dozen renditions of the (former) Soviet National Anthem and the Internationale -- and yes, my musical tastes would raise questions about my heterosexuality were it not for my terrible fashion sense.
Should you insist on a remote controlled solution, you can do what I do with the Zaurus when it's within range of my home Wifi: I use XMMS to either stream shoutcast stations off the 'net, or a Samba into my home PC and play the 55 GBs of music I've (all legally) collected.
Unless you're insistent on allowing multiple users -- and your home PC probably doesn't have that much uploading bandwidth anyway -- Samba's a simple and elegant solution.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
open source. cross platform. rocks.
SlimServer
Netjuke is great for cataloging and streaming you mp3s over the net. www.netjuke.org
I use Ampache (a web-based PHP application) to stream my MP3s from the western USA to Europe this year, and it works very well. Sometimes a song stops in the middle, but I have diagnosed that it's a webserver problem, not Ampache, but haven't had time to fix that.
Anyway, see this: ampache.org
Oh yeah, and once you have all the files on your server and in Ampache, you can keep a local cache of the URLs to all the songs. I do this so I never have to use the web interface unless I want to.
I think Streamsicle (http://www.streamsicle.com/) is exectly what you're looking for. It acts like a shoutcast server, but it alows you to dynamically create playlists through a web interface. It's in java so it works on any OS. Sorry no ogg support though. That's really the only major drawback, solid application though. My school blocks windows networking, so I use streamsicle to listen to music in the lab, it's pretty sweet.
Using a program called Rendezvous Beacon, you can trick iTunes into thinking your iTunes share at home is on the same subnet. It's really not that hard to get around Apple's restriction.
I use Apache::Mp3 to share my music. It's nice because I can easily password protect it with Apache (since we live in these wonderful RIAA sue-happy times) and it's just a standard http access to the music which means every client on the planet supports it. I use iTunes at home and XMMS at work and they both have no problems streaming. I also have a philips streamium in my bedroom which streams from my server as well (though it requires one more special server to get the playlists to it).
Installing it is very simple:
Just 'perl -MCPAN -e shell' and then "install Apache::Mp3". It works on linux, and I even got it working on a Mac OS X beta a few years ago.
I also wrote an mod to Apache::Mp3 to transcode on the fly. So I keep my music in flac format on my server and all the different clients use different formats. My iTunes at home streams wavs from the server, the stremium streams 320Kbit mp3s (since I couldn't get wavs to work), my iTunes at work does 192Kbit mp3s and XMMS at work does 128Kbit oggs.
I'm pretty happy with the setup.
Since you talked about playlists, you can put up playlists and then download them whereever you happen to be. They'll just be a list of URLs to your server. iTunes and XMMS both support that just fine and I image most other music players do as well. And since its your local music player that is controlling the playlist you can randomize it, skip songs, etc. without futzing with the server at all.
It also has a "browse only" feature that you can see in action at http://music.porkrind.org.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
I like Apache::MP3 also. Namp! is the name of the project when all the bits are rolled together (apache, mod_perl, perl, Apache::MP3). Also CPAN is your friend.
.htaccess file. I'm pretty sure it *will* work on Windows, Apache, perl, & mod_perl are all available on the platform, it's just more work because all those components aren't already there.
.htaccess to secure it, the username & password will be a part of the URL for each streamed track and may be clearly visible on the desktop, depending on which streaming client you're using. Also some older clients may not work with URLs that include the user:pass in it. It's been a while but I think Windows Media Player was the one that gave me the most trouble.
There's a demo site so you can see the default interface and try some streams (Apache::MP3 includes a "demo" mode which stops the streams after 30 seconds).
You can block casual access with a simple
I'll tell you two problems I've run into. If you use username/passwords in
Embedded album art in a track may also cause trouble for some clients, specifically iTunes and RealOne (v9 at least, haven't tried the beta). In my testing the album art was added by MusicMatch and iTunes adds them another way (so each app can't see the other's album art) so how the art is added to the track may be a factor. Actually, I think it's more likely that some clients just can't handle streaming tracks with too many bytes of ID3 tag data but I haven't tried any experiments to prove it.
Whether or not you can fast forward or rewind *within* a track depends upon the client. WinAmp does it like a champ. I'm pretty sure Xmms does too. iTunes does not. Someone has told me RealOne Player can do it but it hasn't worked for me.
iTunes is a bad streaming client because it permanently adds each streamed track to your Library. You have to manually select and delete them to clean it up.
If you don't want to bother streaming your own music, I recommend the "Internet radio station" RadioParadise. 128Kbps (or lower in a variety of formats, eclectic, listener-supported, no ads.