Re: Distributed Jukeboxes for LAN

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 01:51:43PM -0700, Monique Y. Herman wrote:
> 
> Have you looked at slimp3?

I have now.  I wonder if the slimp3 device works the same way as a 
client running xmms.  I suspect it does.

Here's a short summary for the archives.

[I'm new to these programs, so don't trust my comments...]

For all its problems[1], I like NetJuke better.  The interface for
searching for songs and creating playlists is better.  I like the idea
behind Slimp3, though.

They have both have a central database for selecting play lists/songs.  

The difference is that NetJuke downloads a .m3u list to the browser 
which passes the file to xmms as the play list.  Then xmms fetches the 
songs.  Works well for playing songs on a local machine, but not for 
remotely controlling the player.

Slimp3, on the other hand, truly streams the content to xmms and
maintains the playlists on a central server.  On clients you start up
something like xmms and point it to the streaming sever.  Clients are
based by IP number (can be assigned names, of course).  So, all the
clients are managed via the central server -- you access a web page,
select an active client and view its playlist and see what it's
currently playing.  Nice.

The down side is that since the Slimp3 server is streaming (and the
client buffering), the interface has a big delay.  Click "skip" in the
web interface and it can be 30 seconds before the song changes!  No back 
button.

I really like the central playlist management idea.  I guess what would
be good is a separate control channel for managing xmms.  Maintain the
playlist on a central server, but instead of streaming just control
xmms' playlist remotely.  I know there's some tools for controlling
xmms, but is there anything to control xmms that can be used over the
network and is bi-directional to keep the playlist on xmms and the
central server in sync?

[1] NetJuke 1.0-rc1: Seems to have some SQL problems (I'm using
Postgresql 7.4.1) selecting some lists:

Mar  1 21:35:28 bumby postgres[17797]: [17-1] ERROR:  column "ge.name" must appear in the GROUP BY clause or be used in an aggregate function
Mar  1 21:35:42 bumby postgres[17797]: [18-1] ERROR:  for SELECT DISTINCT, ORDER BY expressions must appear in select list



-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org