I’ve been under a rock (and roll – hah!), but I just found out about MPD, otherwise known as the music player daemon. I’ve had my music server parked by my stereo for years and have been logging into the command line to play music. MPD makes this unnecessary.
MPD lets you operate your mp3 player from anywhere on your network. The server piece plays the music through the server’s sound card. MPD can even act as a Shoutcast feeder, allowing others to listen over the network (or Internet).
The MPD server is available for some platforms but does not have a Red Hat-compatible RPM package. I had to install a few development libraries in order to get it to compile, including the speex package, a problem which stumped me for a time. I’m considering crafting my own RPM for it now that I’ve got it compiling.
MPD clients are available for most platforms. I use gmpc on my Ubuntu laptop and the outstanding Theremin client on my Mac systems. Fortunately you don’t have to compile anything for most clients. One client I’m particularly interested in is mpcstick, a client which lets you drive MPD using a joystick. I’d like to build an Openslug box as my car computer/mp3 server and use mpcstick to select the tunes.
I like being able to use multiple MPD clients at once. I can start a song or a playlist from one computer and control it completely from another.
Check out MPD if you’re looking for a networked jukebox.