I just finished coding a web-jukebox for myself. It turned out quite well.  A few months ago I began encoding my CD library into MP3 files with the thought that “one day” I’d become a DJ for EVE Radio.  Well my gaming ADHD kicked in and I don’t play EVE (for now). But I’ve got over 5,000 MP3 files on my webserver so I didn’t want them going to waste – esp. over the holidays when I’m visiting my family, etc.

SO… Over the past couple days I’ve been writing a little PHP/MySQL app to stream my MP3 library in various ways – single songs, a whole album, everything by a particular artist, or the whole damn library, in order, or shuffled.  I’m testing it this evening on the road and it seems to be working pretty well.  I had to tweak a few things to change it from only serving the stream on my internal network to the internet, but I got that fixed and now can listen to whatever, wherever. SWEET!

Luckily I had created my MP3 library in some semblance of order (ie using artist/album/song folders and a song naming convention of trackNo_trackName_trackLength, so it was really easy to parse all of that stuff into a MySQL db of all my stuff.  The only thing I have left to do there is assign genres to the songs.  I’ll probably write a little app to do that as well, we’ll see.

It also taught me some new tricks with Apache and PHP (Like opening up other folders to be served outside the web-root directory, and how to write m3u stream files and wpl playlists…) Anyways it’s still a work in progress, but I’m really happy with it, and especially being able to get to ALL of my music from anywhere – I love it. If I get it all nailed down in a nice way I may share the code so you can make your own song-server (if there’s any interest?).

I also got a DVD of In Extremo in concert.  These guys are awesome! Well, they’re awesome if you like German-Rock…with Bagpipes! It’s their “Raue Spree 2005” Concert. Many, if not all of the tracks can be viewed from YouTube – just do a search on In Extremo and you’ll get tons of material for your viewing pleasure – I just wanted to have it in High Quality format 😛 I’m sure I’ll order more of their videos, if I can find them in NTSC format (most are PAL), this was the only one I could readily find, but I’ll do a little more digging.

Anyways – Hope y’all have a great Thanksgiving!!!