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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?"
I've run X on a 386/20 with 4MB ram. It takes about five minutes to start and can't run a window manager, but it actually ended up working fairly well for running remote X apps.
Probably not what you were thinking of, but a Mac makes a fine digital jukebox. I use a dual G5 PowerMac with iTunes and a Squeezebox in my bedroom, but I get the best results with the optical digital audio out on the Mac connected directly to my AV amp's digital input. The new iMac G5 also has a digital optical audio out. And you get an excellent wall-mountable digital photo frame in the bargain...