August 6, 2006
A few years ago, when Jen and I lived in a one-room loft, we both wanted to control the stereo’s music from our respective computers. All our music was in MP3 format, so I wrote some software to let us do just that.
The software had two parts. The server ran on a Linux machine that was hooked up to the stereo through a sound card. That machine also hosted the MP3 files. The client ran on our desktops and sent commands to the server over a TCP/IP connection using a simple protocol. I ran it from my desktop machine and Jen ran it from her laptop, which was connected to the server using a wireless card and router.
The client looked like this (on Windows XP):
The full list of all your songs is on the left, the playlist is on the right, and player controls are in the upper right. Features of the system included:
- Marking songs as “corrupted” so you could keep track of the ones you needed to get again. (See the red barfy face in the picture above.)
- Fade out and fade in on pause/unpause.
- Loading and saving of playlists. The lists were saved on the server, so if you launched the client from another computer you could still get at them.
- Kept track of “situation” tags, useful for grouping songs into “Dinner”, “Mellow”, “Party”, etc.
- Loading and saving of filters. Filters let you restrict what you could see in the song list on the left. You could filter by artist, directory, genre, or situation. Filters were also saved on the server. You could also filter by “corrupted” so you could find them easily. (We never ended up using filters very much.)
- A “quick find” feature. It showed you the list of matching songs as you typed your search string (similar to iTunes’s search feature).
- The playlist could be copied to a portable music player. This was done by transferring the songs to the client and writing them to the root directory of a drive you specified. Presumably this drive was the memory card of the music player.
- Playlist shuffle and repeat.
- Tag editing. The only tags that were editable were title, artist, genre, and situation. You could edit groups of songs at once if you wanted to set one of their tags to the same value. There was a button for breaking up the common title of “Artist - Title” into title and artist fields.
The server was written in C++. It used the id3 library, and I embedded some code that I grabbed from xmms, which they grabbed from mpg123. The client was written in Java and used Swing.
I was going to release the source code, but (a) we stopped using the program once we moved to a multi-room house, where centralized control of music no longer made sense; and (b) at work I’ve since developed a music system, and I’d rather not be releasing free code that competes with it.