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Centrally-Controlled Home Music System on a Budget?
akgoatley writes "Recently my technically inept parents bought a new stereo and have expressed a wish to have it connected to a computer for storing large amount of music - a Linux CD jukebox. An example of this would be The Idiot Jukebox, but the solution has to be less complicated than that. I've already written a fairly basic music database in Perl with a web frontend for searching through it from our LAN, and I'm looking for a Linux-based collection of software to run the jukebox. It has to rip CDs when inserted, store them in a directory structure based on the name of the album. Modification of the ID3 tags is not necessary as my database handles that centrally. To complicate matters, it has to be command-line based as I will be SSHing into the jukebox to control it. The solution has to be a simple collection of software that can be easily controlled via SSH. Due to hardware (and budget) constraints the jukebox will be too slow to run X, anyway :( This means programs like Grip will not be usable. What do you Slashdotters out there think? Any good suggestions or pieces of software you would use?"
From experience I can tell you that aging parents + new technology can end up translating into a lot of tech support calls and quite a few visits for some one-on-one help. However, when I watch my 72 year dad getting such enjoyment from learning how to use his computer, surf the web, work on the family genealogy project, etc. it is more than worth it. I am not saying I haven't gritted my teeth more than once, but he's my dad. I hope my two sons will take the same amount of time with me when I am in my 70's and trying to learn something that is new to me but second nature to them.
http://www.busyweather.com/
I'm working on a project with a few others called Jinzora. It's a PHP jukebox for medium to large music collections. Our next release will feature a much enhanced jukebox mode that lets you play your music back from a wide variety of software (xmms,winamp,etc) and also several hardware players like the slimserver. Check it out at www.jinzora.org (and of course it's all GPL)
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.
Speak before you think
Just for kicks I made remote control streaming karaoke jukebox. I used WWWinamp by Justin Frankel. Pick a song, add it to the playlist, then watch it here. You'll need winamp to watch the streaming karaoke video. Kinda cool, kinda on topic, kinda free (well windows isn't but that's another slash discussion)
I play all of my MP3's via my home network and my TiVo. It's painfully easy to setup.
Not enough space?
According to du my ogg directory, containing 600 CDs ripped at the highest quality setting, is taking 49Gb of space.
That's gonna cost you what...100 bucks?
There are many things a CD rack won't do. Like, say, shuffle your collection. Or let you create playlists off of a large number of CDs. Or start the stereo from an ssh session in another room.
I've been playing all my music off of a harddrive for years. It's hardly impracticle. I used to have a pile of CDs cluttering up my desk. I used to have to worry about CDs getting scratched. I used to have to work to keep the CDs sorted.
No longer.
The cake is a pie
http://gjukebox.sourceforge.net/
Development is pretty much dead, but it is a mix of perl, php and mysql. I have been using it for years and love it.
Web gui, cmd line if you know perl, auto rips cds, stores mp3s logically, in general it is nice.
http://packetnexus.com
It's been out for about 4-5 years, and has received good reviews.
I've coded ASP and PHP versions, and it works on Windows, Unix, and Mac OS X boxes.
Basically, you just drag in the one script file, and it turns your folders of MP3s into a complete streaming site -- whenever you add new files, the site is always automatically up-to-date.
You can use it over your LAN, or (bandwidth permitting) over the Internet.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda