Maxlor Posted May 24, 2003 Share Posted May 24, 2003 Hey, I know you all are tinkerers, and as such I'm sure that there's some nice stuff you've managed to do with your *nix boxes. Why don't you tell us all?I'll start.I love endless playlists. I hate disk-jockey'ing. So the first thing I do when I buy a CD is rip it and put it into my playlist. This poses a small problem: I can only listen to my music at the computer. That's not too bad per se, as I'm at the computer most of the time anyway when I'm at home, however, my athlon is quite noisy and sometimes I like to listen to music in the quiet.I do however have another computer which is very quiet, my router/server running FreeBSD 4.8. It's equipped with a Celeron 446 with passive cooling, some ancient gfx card with 1MB RAM that doesn't even get warm, etc etc, in other words, it's very quiet.So what I did was this:- connect the stereo to this machines soundcard.- write a small perl script that manages the playlist. It saves the playlist as well as the current position to disk after every change, and loads it again when it starts up. This means It'll resume at the same position when I kill it or when I reboot the machine (which I haven't done, btw, in the last 52 days). This Perl script periodically checks /tmp/musicd.input periodically for commands.- write a cgi script as frontend. It displays some controls similar to winamp.So basically, what I can do now, is play my music collection on the stereo without ever needing to juggle CDs, oh, and I can do it remotely too. I can even set timers using the standard unix controls. Eg, say, I want it to wake me up at 7am. So I type: $ at 7amecho 'play' > /tmp/musicd.inputmixer vol 80 Similar code can be used to, say, fire it up 2 mins before I come home in the evening.What is still left to be done? I still need to refine playlist management a bit, and I plan to rewrite the Perl script in C so I can take advantage of FreeBSD's ingenious kqueues. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruno Posted May 24, 2003 Share Posted May 24, 2003 Hi MaxlorGreat topic !And the start you gave was impressive, the playlists routine is a nice touch. Nice to see people so inventive with their computer.My achievement/goal: Fighting old age by keeping the CPU built in my brains running at 100% :) Bruno Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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