best way to control my music from anywhere?

[muehlbucks]

People visiting my small apartment in Chicago are sometimes intimidated and shocked by the presence of computers in every room. Sure, I have a problem... Nobody should be running 5 linux PCs in such a small living space. It seems like people are constantly asking me to justify the abundance of processing in my house. Rather than try to explain what makes linux and OSS so great, I generally refer them to my MythTv box. I tell people "I like that I can control my media and applications from any computer and direct the output to other computers."

I have been struggling with this basic tenent of my linux philosophy. I've had reasonable sucess with XDMCP and running X programs over ssh. I keep running into the same problem... everyday. I'd like to play music on the PC connected my stereo and control it from any PC in the apartment. This is easy enough; I generally run xmms on the mediabox (connected to the stereo). XMMS can be controlled anywhere with XMMSd or via xmms-shell over ssh. To view the X output of XMMS on another computer, i have to kill the original instance and restart it over ssh.

I'm looking for a better solution... Ideally it would combine the jukebox, id3 functionality of Juk or Rhythmbox with an interface that would give realtime information about what's playing on another box. Ideally, the UI could be loaded on all computers at the same time. I would settle for a program like "screen" for X.

What do you use to play your music over the network?

[shakti]

i have 2 boxes. 1 is my workstation and the other my mediabox. On the mediabox i run gemsvnc a vnc server and log in from my mediabox with any vnc client, and voila, i control mediabox localy and remotly.
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Using Gentoo since 2002.

[TheGandalfMite]

You could take a look at using mpd (http://www.musicpd.org/) with phpMp. I haven't tried it myself (not enough hardware), but it should provide you with a web interface that that be accessed from any pc. Of course, you'll need apache or something similar, but hey, who doesn't like installing new servers?

TGM

edit: doh! thanks Schwin, url fixed.

[Schwin97]

Typo in the previous post... the real url is

http://www.musicpd.org/

[Robelix]

What about a web-based system, like the http://gjukebox.sf.net I'm using. On freshmeat you'll find dozens of these.

Robelix
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mysql> SELECT question FROM life, universe, everything WHERE answer=42;
Empty set (2079460347 sec)

[curtis119]

try:

http://obsbox.sourceforge.net/about.php

I think it is exactly what you are looking for.
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Gentoo: it's like wiping your ass with silk.

[merclude]

wow, i was just recently looking for something exactly like these, at first i looked at gnump3d, but that streams the mp3s to the box you access it from, then i just started using a screened session of mp3blaster, that's ok too, but now i got these new toys! thanks everyone
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-merc
my site: http://escalated.net

[merclude]

lil followup, just installed mpd and the php interface on my media box. awesome stuff, exactly what i wanted.

now to find some perty interfaces
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-merc
my site: http://escalated.net

[shank]

Glad you like MPD

[shakti]

I was surprised i did not come across mpd any sooner, i have been looking for something that flexible and stable for ages...
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Using Gentoo since 2002.

[merclude]

whaoh, shank, didnt know you were on these forums! I was browsing the mpd forums and dropped by the irc chat too, nice program ya got
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-merc
my site: http://escalated.net