[lug] Music manager

[Daniel Webb]

On Sat, Jun 17, 2006 at 08:28:57PM -0600, John Hernandez wrote:

> Slimserver might be a good option.  It's OSS written is perl, back-ended
> by MySQL, and there's a debian repository for the development branch.
> There are at least two software clients, one Java-based Squeezebox
> emulator and a headless lightweight client (written in C, I think).
> 
> As an added bonus, you could buy their hardware players for places where
> you might have hifi but no computer.  Players (both software and
> hardware) can be set for synchronized playback.  It supports mp3, flac,
> aac, ogg, and a few other formats.
> 
> I have no affliation whatsoever with the company, but I'm a happy customer.
> 
> sources.list:
> deb http://debian.slimdevices.com stable main
> 
> apt-get install slimserver
> 
> They're at http://slimdevices.com

Strangely, I tried the "apt-get install slimserver" again on a whim, and this
time it worked (I've changed absolutely nothing on my system since I had the
problem before).  It's wasn't pain-free:

  * needed two perl libraries manually from unstable
  * had to tweak the ogg conversion
  * had to download the softsqueeze software player manually
  * had to find a apt sources line to get the lame mp3 encoder

However, now that it's working, I just start a ssh shell to the java client in
headless mode on each of my terminals, and start a Firefox window with a
profile just for the control window.  All of this is of course done
automatically at window manager startup in xinitrc.  Now I can control the
output on any of the terminals from a single window, and even synchronize them
so that the bedroom and living room are playing the same music (at least
theoretically, I haven't tested this since the baby's asleep).  Sweet!  Also
has a nice interface to easily play streaming radio builtin, and handles just
about any format.  The web-based interface is very nice, and seems to have at
least some AJAX going on.  It would be nice if it had a few more features like
ratings, but it's very nice as is.  

Thanks for this tip, now I'm a fan of this company and their software too.  It
does essentially everything I was asking for in my original post, and it's
definitely the most useable networked music jukebox I've seen for Linux by a
long shot.  Once I get a job I'll have to buy one of their hardware boxes for
my living room stereo.