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?"

Re:Idiot Jukebox

[erick99]

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.

Jinzora

[guycouch]

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)

music daemon

[gregmac]

You'd have to find something else to rip, but Music Player Daemon [musicpd.org] 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.

SSH? May I suggest...

[Doppler00]

this? [sourceforge.net] With Bemused, you could control your jukebox from anywhere in the house with your cellphone and view the placelist on your phone.

I risk slashdotting my cable modem but oh well

[t0qer]

Just for kicks I made remote control streaming karaoke jukebox [24.6.167.98]. I used WWWinamp by Justin Frankel. [nullsoft.com] Pick a song, add it to the playlist, then watch it here. [7bamboo.com] 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)

TiVo

[dreamchaser]

I play all of my MP3's via my home network and my TiVo. It's painfully easy to setup.

Console CD Ripping

[paranoos]

I've written a scripting tool for ripping, encoding, taging and naming CDs in Bash. You can find it here [sourceforge.net].

Also, might I suggest using the MusePack [musepack.net] audio format, as it produces higher quality encodes, and is faster than mp3 (both for encoding and decoding), which would be nice for your low-spec machine. However, all the players I know that can use it are X-based (other than the command-line decoder). Is it really an issue to run an X session that opens XMMS? You can use the built-in twm window manager, no Gnome/KDE nonsense.

Re:low tech solution

[ucblockhead]

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.

Globecom Jukebox

[jalewis]

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.

Re:Why bother?

[Nikker]

Why not, If it was me trying to push an mp3 player on my folks this is what I would do,

• Get a CD ROM with DAE at least 16x

• Write a routine that will start to play the ripped (mpp3/ogg) while the cd is ripping, to make it seem like its doing both at the same time and reduce delay

• Make sure there are as *FEW* buttons as possible(REC, Play, FF, RW, search)

• Try to make an interface using an external 10 line LCD that you could grab at any supply store for cheap and keeps things simple

• If you must use a CRT remember it is *NOT* the graphics and colors, it is the *FONT* that makes the UI

My solution: Andromeda

[turnstyle]

I hope it's ok to mention my own software, Andromeda [turnstyle.com].

It's been out for about 4-5 years, and has received good reviews [turnstyle.com].

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.

Don't Hate me...

[tpillon]

I know everyone will hate me for saying this, and I know you specifically want to use Linux, but I'm going to suggest it anyway...

I use an old Compaq 466 P.O.S. running Windows 98 and Winamp3. I have it on my network, rip the music on my Slackware or XP box and just copy it over. I have a keyboad with the "play, stop, pause, etc." hotkeys painted on it and I also use VNC to control it when my main system is on. The system is on pretty much 24/7 and it has worked well for me...

It's simple for everyday use (just smack the Bill Gates picture on the side to bring it out of standby and hit 'X') but has easy access to the full winamp EQ, volume controls etc... I don't have to see a windows logo, start menu or anything, just the winamp interface (main screen, EQ, playlist editor, Media library).

Without the PC?

[erixtark]

Has anyone tried setting up a harddrive based MP3-player without a PC?
It should be possible to use one of the USB harddrive-to-WiFi proxies out there, like this one: Linksys NSLU2 [linksys.com] together with one of the MP3 players that plays from the network, like Creatives: Wireless Player [creative.com] (although that one requires a server running some software).
Then you'd have USB harddrive -> WiFi Proxy -> Mp3 player without the hassle, power consumption, noise and ugliness of a PC.