Archive for June, 2005

Playing MP3:s on a remote computer (not streaming)

Friday, June 17th, 2005

This is old news for me, but I realized that it might be helpful for other people so I decided to write something about it anyway…

I really like my MythTV system, but using it to play MP3s is quite a mess. Turn on the TV, find the remote, navigate through the MP3 collection one letter at a time and then add the songs… I realized I really needed a simpler way to control the audio player…

After some searching, I discovered Music Player Daemon. The server end (the daemon) only handles the library and the actual playing of files, the cool part is that there are quite a few clients for it. A WinAmp-like Windows frontend, a command line (console) based clients, graphical clients for Linux and (what I finally settled for) a web interface written in PHP.

Since there’s always a computer on somewhere in my apartment (actually, it’s more like 3 or 4) it only takes a few seconds to browse to the album I want to hear and queue it. The only manual action required is to turn on the amplifier, so my next step is logical: find a way for the MPD server to turn on the amp.

Perhaps through an IR blaster, or through the Sony S-link interface.

On a side note: I’ve used a number of different solutions for streaming MP3s from my collection at home to work and other places…

  • Andromeda – PHP-based jukebox with a nice interface, unfortunately it’s crippled shareware.
  • Apache mod_musicindex – an Apache module that makes it really simple to play songs, but the interface is ugly and directory-based.

    Yet to be tested:

  • Edna – simple Python script that serves MP3 with dynamic playlists.

    • Posted in Computer related bits & pieces, HTPC | No Comments »

    Samba-sharing a folder without passwords on Knoppix

    Wednesday, June 15th, 2005

    When trying to access a crashed laptop 2.5″ hard drive, I found myself a bit stuck when trying to share the entire drive on a Windows network. Accessing Windows shares from a linux box is really easy with Samba, but sharing a directory without any passwords was a bit more difficult…

    Knoppix found the USB disk without any problems, but sharing the drive required a few more steps.

    Finally I found a page with some helpful tips:

  • Edit the /etc/samba/smb.conf file
  • Replace “security=user” with “security=share”
  • Add something like this to the file:
    [sharename]
    public=yes
    writeable=no
    path=/mnt/uba1
    guest ok=yes
    browsable=yes

    Then a quick /etc/init.d/samba restart did it.

    • Posted in Computer related bits & pieces, Linux | No Comments »

    Cloning Windows XP installs with Norton Ghost

    Sunday, June 5th, 2005

    My employer recently bought a number of used PC:s, which all required Windows XP installs. The machines weren’t very fast (about 866 MHz/384 MB RAM on an average), and I didn’t really feel like spending 1.5 hrs x 10 machines on installing XP, and then running Windows Update, installing virus scanner, spyware detection, printers, FireFox and adjusting settings.

    Thus, I decided to use Ghost… The first approach was to create a disk image file of the “master” PC and using it on the other PC:s, but accessing the file (located on an external USB hard drive) proved to be difficult.

    The second option was to use the “peer-to-peer” mode, meaning the master computer rebooted into DOS/Ghost mode while the slave (target) computer booted from a “peer-to-peer network boot floppy” which Norton created for me. Both computers got IP adresses through DHCP, and all that remained was to connect them and start the copying.

    I was quite surprised by the speed, a ~1.5 GB XP install took only 7 minutes on a 100 MBit network – pretty fast considering the relatively slow hardware!

    All that remained when the transfer was done was to reboot, adjust the computer & user name and uninstall Ghost (since it was installed on the master computer, all slaves got it too – pretty silly but unavoidable). Voilá!

    Posted in Computer related bits & pieces, Windows | 1 Comment »

    Saving and burning RealAudio streams

    Sunday, June 5th, 2005

    When I discovered that Slayer (one of my favourite metal bands) would be featured on P3 Live, I decided to record that show… Sveriges Radio uses Windows Media and Real for their streams, and after some searching I found the excellent (free!) program Net Transport that would help me to save the stream to disk. The result was a ~40 MB large .rm file that I needed to convert to wav to be able to burn it (and/or convert it into MP3).

    Someone on a mailinglist suggested I’d use DB Power Amp which, with the help from RealAlternative quickly turned the .ra file into a huge wav.

    Using Sound Forge, I set so called “markers” in the file, named them into the song names, then turned them into regions and then saved all regions as separate files. I was pretty surprised to see that the Nero wave editor could read the Sound Forge marks directly, which meant I could burn the large WAV file instead of using the splitted WAV files. With the “no gaps between tracks” option enabled, the resulting disc sounded perfect!

    Edit:
    It’s now one month later, and I’ve almost forgotten the details on how to do this… Net Transport needs a rtsp link, and those are a bit tricky to extract. I did discover that selecting “File”->”Clip properties”->”View clip info” in the Real Player displayed the RTSP URL.

    Posted in Computer related bits & pieces, Windows | No Comments »