In-house MP3 Server

From: Christopher Smith <csmith_at_amdocs.com>
Date: Fri Feb 8 10:32:17 2002

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Cini, Richard [mailto:RCini_at_congressfinancial.com]

> So, here's the question...if you were setting-up a networked MP3
> player in your house, how would you do it? hardware's not the
> question --
> just software.

Well, here's how I'd do it. :) (Sorry, I think I've delved into the
hardware too much...)

First, I'd stay away from windows at all costs.

Personally, I'd use VMS, or that not being an option due to hardware
concerns, I'd use some form of unix. I'll assume VMS is out of the
question, so here's how I'd do it in that case:

Find three machines. One only needs to be powerful enough to hold.
the disks and serve them through NFS or something. It should also
be a boot-server for the other two.

The second should run samba (if you really must ignore my first
point. :), or a web server, or something. (like an FTP server. IMO,
that's the way to serve "dynamic clickable catalogs") Again, it
could be a pretty light machine. It should netboot from the first
machine, and be diskless.

The third should be able to encode in reasonable time and equipped
with a CD drive. :) It should also boot from the first machine, and
be diskless.

I would use this software:

Probably NetBSD. Rebuild the kernel at least to only contain the
things you need. Cut it down so that the main system runs one
getty on the console, and nothing extra is running.

The other systems would run only the applications they need.
Since they should boot from the main system, forget about getty,
even. Just run the proper daemons, and on the machine that encodes
things, have it run a custom script, or other thing, that will
automatically encode whatever you feed it, and stuff it into
the proper directory.

You could use Samba, FTP, or whatever you were using to transfer
the music to your computer for file management, too. If it were
my system, the machine that you were transferring from would also
have a mechanism in place to play the files itself. Perhaps
that could be done by CGI. That would require that it was a
slightly larger system, though.

The machine for encoding would run cdparanoia, something to access
cddb, and l3enc or bladeenc.

Chris


Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL

/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
 
Received on Fri Feb 08 2002 - 10:32:17 GMT