SCHAPPY — 23. November 2005, 1:55

Individual Entertainment

Working in a single room with more than one person makes it difficult. On the one hand, it is boring listening the typing sounds of the others keyboard. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to find a compromise for listening the _right_ music. However, to overcome this problem, a possible solution is to use earphones or to improve the user-individual influence of the listening music. Therefore, we use BrowseAmp in combination with winamp. It offers multiple access for user-interaction via a html-interface to a single server running winamp. Thus, each user can decide individually which files to add to the global playlist – fair, eh? It comes with a simple user management to use individual settings and access methods. Moreover, administrators can define explicit IPs for accessing the offered service and set passwords within the user management console. Some more esthetic plugins help to take this decision, such as the shown LAN Dj.
Browseamp using LAN-DJ-Plugin
Although, a version for the Quintessential Player exists, it is a better idea to use winamp instead. The browseamp plugin for winamp is more comfortable and offers some more features and settings in the configuration menu. Meanwhile, I think QCD is a winamp derivative, because it behaves similar to prior winamp versions and is detected as „running winamp“ during the original winamp installation.

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  1. Kommentar by schmidt @ 23. November 2005, 13:39

    Inspired by your idea, I tried to install a similar system in our group. The Unix/Linux solution to this problem could be a combination of mpd (Music Player Demon) – which is able to play several audio formats and manage playlists and a music library – and Jinzora – a php based web interface. From now on everybody is able to control the songs played on my workstation.

    Additionally I will have to set up an ftp-server to allow the others to upload their music. But that’s not too important.

    The next stage will be to distribute the audio signals to the other workstations and pipe them into their speakers. But I think that will cause several synchronisation problems I’m not willing to solve yet.

  2. Kommentar by SCHAPPY @ 23. November 2005, 14:39

    That sounds like a great idea, because it is a more stable version of the described scenario. However, the synchronisation problem is almost insolvable, because jitter is jitter and will not be static at any bandwidth. Therefore, try to obtain a pair of good stereo speakers and use them on one idle server 🙂

  3. Kommentar by schmidt @ 23. November 2005, 18:30

    The only main difference to your solution is that nobody has to be logged since mpd runs as service/demon. Whether it is more stable or not a may not assess – the latest release of mpd is in version 0.11.5 . And the usability of this team is not tested yet.

  4. Kommentar by SCHAPPY @ 23. November 2005, 20:14

    However, I really like mpd (or equivalent solutions such as mserv found by André), but I do not have a linux box in the project room.
    I decided to put winamp tomorrow to a dedicated server to offer music 24/7 on demand. On this server is no user will be logged on, because winamp will be started via srvany automatically as a system service ;). Another colleague will organize some better speakers putting them to that dedicated server solves almost all problem. Finally, I’ve some further ideas, but more about that laterone…

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