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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/
Andromeda
Friends of me use it for their common room music/streaming mp3 setup:
http://tunez.sourceforge.net/
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?
iTunes.
open source. cross platform. rocks.
SlimServer
Use a combination of Snowcrash, Winamp, and SHOUTcast. I haven't tried snowcrash with Winamp 5, but it should work.
I believe SHOUTcast has a streaming-on-demand feature, but it's not as nice as Snowcrash.
I am biased as I wrote it, but there was a new release of GNUMP3d yesterday.
THis allows you to stream MP3/OGG Vorbis/MPG/WMV files across a network via a browser interface.
You can search, sort, downsample and generally have a blast.
Check it out?
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.
My solution for a room of three people (including me): An old PC with a soundcard, a pair of el-cheapo passive speakers, an ISA-Bus FM radio card, and a selfmade floppy-sized Linux. It runs a tiny webserver (mini_httpd), dhcpcd, and three CGIs, one to select the radio station, one to control the soundcard's mixer, and one to control the CDROM drive (Audio CD only). After booting, the sound volume is set to background level, and a local FM station playing acceptable music is tuned in. Now we can control everything via web browser, and (because I had too much time) a CHM (Windows HTML Help) file. Station names are stored in a text file on the DOS-formatted floppy, so we could easily update the station list when needed.
Imagine some better speakers and you have music for the entire classroom. OK, my solution has no MP3 player, but it would require just one more CGI and some kind of mass storage device full of MP3s (CD-R/W, DVD-/+RW, USB Flash, Harddisk, CF, whatever). You may want to look for some self-made Linux-based MP3 players, they usually have a web interface for play lists (and perhaps volume controls).
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
Set up shoutcast to stream whatever xmms is putting out. Use one of those xmms-remote programs that lets you control xmms from the command line. Write a small program, in bash or python or something that provides a gui/curses/text interface that will do this: ssh into the box, get list of mp3s, let user select mp3, control xmms from the command line to make that mp3 play. Also allow stopping, pausing, shuffle on/off, etc.
There are also shoutcast server control things that make a web site that controls the server. Often they are not direct control, but a request queue type of thing where you request a song and it gets put in the queue. Get winamp5 and start browsing shoutcast with the minibrowser open, you'll eventually find what I'm talking about.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I use edna. it has it's own web server and lets me browse all my mp3 music and stream it to my brain while i'm at the university. and very easy to set up.
-- damn you, internet!
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.
shfs website
...
step 1, keep all mp3's in a central place
step 2, have ssh access
step 3, locally shfs mount mp3s
step 4,
step 5, profit!
ok, shfs allows you to mount a remote filesystem while only having ssh access. Simply mount the mp3 dir and point xmms or whatever at it and play. Works flawlessly for me.
Brian
Are you a Candy Addict?
Easy set up, easy to use. Supports Mac, Lin, Win. You Can See More Here
I'd love it if you'd try Jinzora. I'm the primary developer of it (and loyal /. reader). We are nearing our 1.0 release, and we feel that Jinzora is simply put the easiest to us, install, and configure, and is the best looking of all the web based Jukeboxes around. Jinzora can stream via HTTP (including video), playback locally on the server (ala music TiVo), or frontend a shoutcast server so you can use it for a streaming radio station.
Please stop on by at www.jinzora.org, we'd love to have the /. crowd's input! We are VERY open to suggestions/bug/feature requests and try to answer all forum posts VERY quickly!
Just in case you haven't gotten enough suggestions yet, I thought I'd post my favorite. The only reason I ever found it was so that I could stream music to my Rio Receiver without a windows box, but it has evolved much since then and can now stream any kind of media(including shoutcast and other stream sources)to multiple clients. It can do much more than that...Just check out the home page.
/. crowd loves screenshots here's one of a client streaming music, checking out the server status(who is streaming what song), and editing a couple playlists.
Here's an architecture overview of how it all works.
Since I know the
Wort Wort Wort!
There are two real reasons for streaming media like this.
Applications like mine also make it nice and simple to download a large collection of songs, for example every track with the word "Girl" in the title - doing that manually by downloading each individual track would be a bit more painful.
Really each to their own .. you don't need to stream, I just find that it works well for me.
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 was assuming in the first question the download was related to a webserver - having just a raw directory index, or hierarchy.
In that case, as you say, the streaming is pretty much identical.
The real difference is with my project, and others like it, you can create playlists, control downsampling on the fly, see a list of the most recent tracks served, have a realtime list of currently streaming files and more.
For me personally I use the GUI a lot due to having a large archive of music - and the single killer feature is the ability to search.
I can instantly create a playlist filled with songs by a single artist, or of a particular genre.
The code is extensible, and the GUI is themable, so there are many more interesting things that can be done - for example one think I've been thinking of writing for a while is a time-filler. Type in a time and have it return a random playlist which lasts just that amount of time.
A simple means of filling 30 minutes whilst working for example.
Other options and features are available, but I hope I've cleared it up a little bit anyway..
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.
Just get a freaking iPod! Why the heck would you want to waste your schools bandwidth or drive space with MP3's? Another thing, it would open the school up to problems with the RIAA who is already going after students and some of the schools themselves. I am sure you would catch holy hell if a SysAdmin found your MP3 collection on the schools server!
Companies are paranoid about this sort of thing and most block MP3 files with their proxy servers and are already scanning drives looking for MP3's on employee machines.
The iPod will handle everything self contained in a portable form. 40GB's if you get the biggest iPod.
Most people could carry their entire music collection on a single iPod. Even if you can't fit it all on the iPod, you can at least load a huge amount. More then you could possibly listen to in a single day.
If you want to connect it to speakers, there are small kits for that or you just plug it into PC speakers. Heck, you can even broadcast a signal with an iPod accessory to other's with FM Walkmans to listen to the music if you wish to use headphones.
iTunes will stream the playlists to another iTunes computer on the same subnet. Gasp, you could even use the Windows version of iTunes if you must. There are ways around the subnet thing. Streaming from a home computer to the campus will probably suck up huge amounts of bandwidth on both ends. If you have a cable modem at home, prepare to be slapped for exceeding a bandwidth cap. Also you might attract the attention of a network sysadmin on campus when they notice the bandwidth spike.
As far as development goes, nothing beats an Apple laptop with the developer tools and few other things thrown in. C/C++, ObjC, Java, Tomcat, JBOSS, Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, Emacs, ViM, CVS, etc., etc. Plus you can get Microsoft Office X which is completely compatible with Office XP. You can even get Virtual PC along with Office X to run other Windows based software if you must.
Only the original release of 4.0. I still have a copy on a back up hard drive. I'd serve it up on my site, but I don't really feel like being slashdotted. That, and I need to get to bed. Mmmmm sleep.
Since everyone is plugging their own programs that do this, I'll plug mine: Gronk.
It gives you a FreeDB-driven web-based playlist manager and controls a running XMMS process. The XMMS Oddcast DSP plugin lets it shout to a local Icecast server so you can listen locally or remotely.
I also like the Crossfade plugin, for smooth transitions between songs.