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Listen to your tunes anywhere with a streaming server
Posted on Saturday, March 05 @ 04:35:14 PST by lincomatic
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Do you have a huge collection of music that doesn't fit into your portable MP3 player? Why not make your SFF box into a music server which can be accessed from anywhere on the Internet? I found this interesting software called Andromeda which lets you stream your entire collection of music files...
If your MP3 collection is getting too big to lug around everywhere, streaming software may be the answer. Imagine sitting in a Cyber cafe in Paris with a WiFi-enabled PocketPC and headphones, listening to your music collection halfway around the world. Your entire family can have access to the collection at their workplaces too. Even when at home, it's cumbersome to set up Windows shares to access across all the machines in your LAN. By setting up an HTTP-based server, you can access your media across diverse machines running Linux, etc... anywhere and anytime. All the clients need is a web browser and a media player which can handle streaming content, such as Windows Media Player, or my preferred player, Winamp.
Andromeda
It's easy to set up a streaming server. I picked Andromeda to evaluate because it was the simplest, and seemed to offer enough features for my purposes. It costs $35 for the Personal Edition, and they have full-featured demos whose only restriction is that they skip every other file in a directory. You have your choice of ASP or PHP versions.
I demoed the PHP version. It was a snap to install. Detailed installation instructions are available on the Andromeda site, so I will only summarize it here. Put it Andromeda into an IIS directory w/ your tunes, install PHP, and it's ready to go. What's cool is it lets you either stream or download your music, and you can even set up a playlist. Since it's PHP, it shouldn't be difficult to hack it to work w/ videos, photos, etc. A very important feature is password protection. You don't want to let strangers get to your copyrighted content, lest the RIAA or MPAA come after you.
Below is a screenshot of a web browser viewing an Andromeda server:
When you click on one of the green arrow buttons, the server generates a corresponding playlist on the fly, which is then fed to your chosen media player by your web browser. They grey rectangular buttons let you manually create a custom playlist. Note that you can also download individual tracks rather then streaming them if you prefer. I was impressed by how responsive Andromeda is running on my EPIA M9000.
GNUMP3d
A terrific open-source alternative to Andromeda is GNUMP3d, and open-source MP3/OGG stream server released by the Gnu Project . Below is a screenshot of GNUMP3d serving the same content as in the Andromeda sample above:
Here is a quick comparison of GNUMP3d vs Andromeda:
Pros:
- it has a built in web server, so you don't have to figure out how to configure an external web server such as IIS or Apache.
- customizable - it comes with multiple skins, and you can also make your own. since it's written in Perl, it's infinitely hackable, too, so you can modify it to your heart's content.
- fine-grained access control by password and host
- content organization by folder or tags. also has a search function
- user-accessible statistics, including what's currently playing
- custom playlists
- random selection (shuffle play)
Cons:
- While being written in Perl makes it easy to hack, it also requires that you install Perl, which is quite large, on your system before you can run it. Also, since Perl is an interpreted language, it needs a decent amount of CPU power to run.
Compared to Andromeda, GNUMP3d has more features. For instance, Andromeda only has a folder view, while GNUMP3d lets you browse by Artist, Genre,
Year, or Album. However, Andromeda's PHP code is much more efficient. On my VIA M9000 motherboard running Windows XP SP2, GNUMP3d is painfully slow.
If you find performance to be unacceptably slow in Windows, you can try running GNUMP3d from within Cygwin, which is a Unix-like environment for Windows. There must be some performance issues with ActiveState's Perl implementation, because response time improves dramatically when running GNUMP3d under Cygwin. Unfortunately, it's still too slow, so I will have to wait until I either get a faster machine or have a chance to see if it's faster under Linux.
SlimServer
SlimServer is a completely different beast. It's actually the open source server software for a piece of hardware called the SqueezeBox. What's cool is that you can use it without owning the hardware, because there is an open-source emulator called Softsqueeze. Unfortunately, it's not as flexible when working with 3rd party media players such as Winamp. I will be discussing the pros and cons of this solution in a future article, so I'll just leave you with a screenshot of a web browser viewing SlimServer:
IMHO, SlimServer's got the slickest look and feel. The performance is decent on my M9000, too.
What's really cool is you can run all of the above servers simultaneously on one machine. Just be sure to select different port numbers for each one. In my case, I used 999 (Andromeda), 8888 (GNUMP3d), and 9000 (SlimServer).
Links:
Andromeda
GnuMP3d
SlimServer/SoftSqueeze
Here are some alternatives I found, but didn't try yet:
Zina : Free Self-proclaimed Andromeda clone. However, it's actually quite different, letting you put in album art, etc.
Globecom Jukebox: Open source full-featured server which runs on Linux.
Jinzora: Another very fancy Open-source implementation; runs on Linux or Windows. Integrates w/ content management systems such as Mambo, CPGNuke, and MDPro.
WMJ: This one is in alpha and doesn't have any screenshots. Open-source and PHP-based.
MP3Machine: This page is a decent directory of streaming media clients and servers. I found Andromeda from it.
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