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?"

Idiot Jukebox

[FrenchyinCT]

Are you entirely certain this is a good idea? Aging parents + new technology = unending tech support calls and the increasing likelihood of parricide...

CPU

[GrAfFiT]

You mention : "the jukebox will be too slow to run X"
If you can't get X to run smoothly, how do you expect to encode you CDs ?

low tech solution

[FiReaNGeL]

Buy them a CD rack. Remove CD from CD rack, insert into stereo, play.

Honestly, most new stereo cd players come with a 50 discs capacity... is it worth the trouble? If you have 'low hardware and budget' I doubt you'll have space to rip 500 cds at a good bitrate anyway. Could be a cool project, just for the fun. But it's totally non-practical, in my view.

OMG

[Apreche]

I can kind of understand when people are looking for a piece of software that does X, Y and Z and they can't find something for Windows. But for linux there are multiple online, free places where you can search for software that meets your needs.

I use gentoo, so my first place is esearch. If I want a ripping program I open up a term and do

esearch -Sc rip

. It's that easy. Look what came up!

[ N] media-sound/rip (1.07): A command-line based audio CD ripper and mp3 encoder

.

If you don't use gentoo and don't have esearch there are still places you can look. How about sourceforge or freshmeat? How about google?

Once you find the programs that do what you need such as ripping, encoding, playing, etc. You write a bunch of scripts to make it nicely and easily controlled via the command line.

An even better solution is to write scripts that use ncurses or such to make a better interface in the terminal. Then you can use gnu screen to make it even more awesome.

Ask slashdot should be specifically reserved for questions which either cannot be answered by computers easily or questions that take a very long time to research, and it is likely that someone on slashdot knows the answer off the top of their head.

Why bother?

[InternationalCow]

OK, I am probably the nth person writing to say this, so mod me redundant... But, why this complicated solution? For a couple hundred bucks you by an iMac (candy colored one) and put in a big hard disk. Connect decent speakers. Use iTunes. And there you are, instant juke box. Why this complicated solution? I mean, you get mega geek points, but as far as simplicity for elderly people is concerned, your way is not the way to go IMHO. My kids have the iMac + speakers solution and it works wonderfully. They use Audion with a nice skin for kids snd have required only very limited explanation of how it works.

Re:low tech solution

[Em Ellel]

while I generally agree, some math shows:

Say 1 CD at 192 is about 100MB
so 500CDs= 500 x 100 MB = 50,000MB so about 50GB, given that you can get a 120GB IDE disk for under $90 easy, I think it is safe to say that ripping 500 CDs is more likely limited by ability to find 500 CDs worth ripping, rather than disk capacity.

-Em

Re:CPU

[krymsin01]

He may be confusing running KDE or Gnome with running X. I use fluxbox on my aging laptop and have no problems. Try to runing KDE and the laptop will just sit there churning the hard drive because of lack of memory.

Re:Idiot Jukebox

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a lot of us actually like helping out friends and family, and especially parents who gave us so much earlier in our lives.

Yes, a lot of us actually enjoy showing others how to use their computers to their full advatange.

Yes, a lot us actually want to fix others' screw-ups so they're not turned-off by computers, so they know they have a person to rely on, so they're not afraid to experiment and become comfortable with computers.

Yes, a lot us actually are patient enough to provide tech support to friends and family, to show them how Opera and Mozilla are better than IE, Mac and Linux are more secure than Windows, how they don't necessarily need to buy everything at twice the price from Best Buy.

Yes, I'm certain I want to help my friends and family. Because they certainly help me when I need them.

Re:low tech solution

[lar]

But what about the mb?

I can't say for sure, but if he is worried about the CPU's ability to run X, then he probably has a pretty old processor and, therefore, motherboard. Old motherboard's cannot handle that kind of storage.

I'm running a K6-2 400MHz machine, and the best it can do is run a 30GB hard drive (which is actually a 40GB hd jumpered down to 30GB).

So, a $30 60GB hard drive (are they really *that* cheap?!) would probably cost a lot more, considering CPU and MB.

Re:Why bother?

[tarth]

That sounds exactly like AirPort Express with AirTunes [apple.com]. I have one in my dorm, and I can tell you it is
a) convenient
b) a good way to impress chicks.

I highly recommend it to anyone that uses iTunes on a laptop.

Don't reinvent the jukebox

[Doc Ruby]

Why store the music in directories based on the album name? Just dump it anywhere it can be quickly retrieved. Keep the name/directory lookup in the database in Perl - the filesystem is a crappy database management system. It's too subset oriented to reflect the relationships among the music data, like bands/solo, compilations, live sit-ins, nonunique titles like "Greatest Hits", etc. Use a unique namespace generated for storing your data, and lookup in the DB when retrieving.

And why write a database in Perl, when you can use Perl DBI::[MySQL, Postgres]? Adding features will be a lot faster/easier, including using other people's code; not to mention the possibility of higher quality code from an open source process. You don't want your stereo to crash during a party.

Re:Idiot Jukebox

[wondergibbon]

Are you entirely certain this is a good idea? Aging parents + new technology = unending tech support calls and the increasing likelihood of parricide...

As opposed to when you were young, and they were showing you how to do something with technology that was new to you? Like, say, ride a bike? Use a spoon? Walk? How many times did you ask for their help???

Who bought you your first computer?

You have to give back. And instead of it being a chore, you should be grateful you can.

A newbie is a newbie is a newbie - no matter what age.