Home Jukebox Idea - RFC and Questions

[Caspian]

I posted here because I am not the "music person" in my house so know very little about music or players or anything like that so I have no idea where to start really. The population here has a very diverse collection of hobbies and interests - besides multiboxing - and we are often doing many things to extremes or in different nonstandard ways and there is a very deep knowledge base on a wide variety of topics. I am hoping this will be one of them. So far I have done zero work on this as I am still in the brain storming phase.

Background:
I recently decided to finally set up my sound system after leaving it boxed after my last move.
My wife has a rather large CD collection that we have digitized.
Currently everyone just listens to their headphones playing music in Winamp or iTunes.

Problem:
I would like to be able to connect my Mac (G5 Power Mac) into my sound system - doable with a fiber digital audio cable, I just need to buy one that is long enough.
Then, I want to be able to do a "web based jukebox" off my my G5.

What I envision is the following base features:
Serve up a Web Page/Site with our music catalog
Have everyone able to log in and add songs to a queue from their PC
Queue plays through like a normal jukebox
Have "admin access" for the wife and myself to veto stupid selections by the kids
Music plays to the sound system
Normal computer sound plays out of the computer speakers

Extended features could be
Fancy Interface with album art etc.
Search
Configurable categories. favorites and/or play lists
Long term - be able to stream to multiple locations. Everything is upstairs right now. But If I were to put speakers downstairs I would like to be able get the music to them, separately, but through the same main interface.

Comments
I would like to use Apache as my webserver and could handle different access levels with htaccess groups
Being that the Mac is Unix and has by beloved Korn Shell I could probably script most of the back end and I could produce a bare bones website.
I need to figure out how to play music from the command line on the mac.
Figure out how to get the encoded data out of MP3s - title, artist length etc. via some type of script.

Questions
The big one is of course - does it make sense?
Does something like this exist already in a Commercial or Freeware product?
Additional things I should want look for?
Without googling or anything - anyone know the answers to my questions about Mac Command line stuff off the top of their head?
Any additional comments? Suggestions?

Thanks for reading.

[Enndo]

If its just for use in your house, you can do like i do, I have a seperate PC I use as a "media server" basically a duel core, 2 gigs of ram, with a terabyte hard drive, I have all my music and movies on here and have the folder shared so any pc in my house can access it on my network. Setting up a webserver for it would be a great idea, let me know if you find an easy way to get one going.

[Caspian]

If its just for use in your house, you can do like i do, I have a seperate PC I use as a "media server" basically a duel core, 2 gigs of ram, with a terabyte hard drive, I have all my music and movies on here and have the folder shared so any pc in my house can access it on my network. Setting up a webserver for it would be a great idea, let me know if you find an easy way to get one going.Are you playing the music on each PC? I already do that.

My "media server" (the Mac) has the capability to connect to a pretty decent home entertainment sound system. So I what I want is for any PC to be able to control Media Server's output to the big sound system through a Jukebox like queuing system. Ideally through a web interface though a client application would be ok too. I could fire up VNC and just have everyone battle over iTunes but that isn't as cool - and I don't want my kids screwing around on my Mac.

[aboron]

I've had some success with using this product in low end distributed mp3 setups: http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_features.html

I should do everything you need and more. It started life as an open source project, and now the code base and development is so established they can't take it back. But they do sell nice stand-alone players for it (if you need to get the music to some other area later, like bedrooms or such). And there should also be a Java based free player client that can run on any other computer - aside from the player controls from the web interface.

Basically on the Server machine, you need to run the server program, and then run one instance of the software client also.

Edit: I'm not trying to insult anyone by saying low end, my own stuff is low end by comparision to the hundreds of thousands of dollars I see some of our customers spending on distributed audio/video systems like ( http://www.kaleidescape.com/ )

Edit again: Here's a link to the software player http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/ , logitech does it's best to imply you need a hardware box from them, so this link isn't easy to locate on the site that has the server.

[Enndo]

Hmm I don't know how to set something like that up. I would bet there is some software out there for it. But than again I've never interfaced a sound system with a pc.

[Caspian]

@Enndoh - I don't either that's why I'm here :D

@aboron
That looks like it might fit the bill. I will give it a spin when I get home tonight. Thanks!

You have customers spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on stuff like this & home entertainment? Wow. I think I could win the lotto and wouldn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a setup.

[aboron]

The biggest residential job I was involved with so far, the customer spent over 2 million with the Audio/Video subcontractor alone. This included streaming audio and movies to 32 rooms with sat radios, tuners, mp3 servers, sat tv and cable boxes, video projectors and plasmas, many high end audio systems in special rooms, the kaleidescape , hvac control, lighting control, pool and spa control, security system control, pan/tilt camera controls, ipod docks with touch screen remote, the complete phone system, and all the touch panels and programming for it.
My company sub-contracted to the hardware guys to do just the control programming, which came in at around $100k after all the changes and adds were done, and took about 6 months of total programming time spread over about 2 years. This job actually caused the hardware dealer to go bankrupt due to mismanagement of the 50% down payment.

So if you ever hit the lottery and want to go with a larger setup, feel free to get back to me. ;)

[Caspian]

Dang that is nuts! You could have moved into a room somewhere in that place and nobody would have noticed you for years I bet.

What part of the country is this in?

[Caspian]

Well I got SqueezeCenter up and running in a Proof Of Concept mode on my Mac. Setup took about 20 minutes. It has the core features I want. I am not 100% happy with it but it looks like some of the plugins might address some of the things I don't care for. It does the main thing I want it to do though, remotely control the music on the server via web from any PC in the house. So the rest is gravy and can be worked around if necessary.

Next step is to do some cabling to test out the connection to the Sound System to prove that out. If that works as planned then the full install. /woohoo

Thanks for the info!

[Gomotron]

I'm not sure why you want to take this route when a simpler method work in my house.

I use mostly Apple stuff, so it may not necessarily work for you.

I just use my Mac Pro to be a music/media server by sharing the entire library across the network. Then, each PC/Mac will have access through iTunes to the entire library and be able to stream music to their own computer. I also use an Airport Express that is attached to the home stereo to stream music through the house. You could theoretically get multiple Airport Express stations for each separate "zone" to which you want the ability to stream music.

If you want to be able to change playlists, etc. you'll be limited due to the nature of iTunes and the inability to directly alter the main library. However, you can set up the main Mac media server to allow Screen Sharing and then anyone (at least with a Mac and OSX) can access the computer directly and mess around with the iTunes Library. The only problem with this is the fact that I think only one person could Screen Share at a time.

While this doesn't cover everything you want, it'll do a lot of it and it's free.

[Caspian]

I'm not sure why you want to take this route when a simpler method work in my house.

I use mostly Apple stuff, so it may not necessarily work for you.

I just use my Mac Pro to be a music/media server by sharing the entire library across the network. Then, each PC/Mac will have access through iTunes to the entire library and be able to stream music to their own computer. I also use an Airport Express that is attached to the home stereo to stream music through the house. You could theoretically get multiple Airport Express stations for each separate "zone" to which you want the ability to stream music.

If you want to be able to change playlists, etc. you'll be limited due to the nature of iTunes and the inability to directly alter the main library. However, you can set up the main Mac media server to allow Screen Sharing and then anyone (at least with a Mac and OSX) can access the computer directly and mess around with the iTunes Library. The only problem with this is the fact that I think only one person could Screen Share at a time.

While this doesn't cover everything you want, it'll do a lot of it and it's free.The main thing I want is to play music from the sound system I have. I do share the library out so everyone can listen on their PC. I don't do the screen sharing, though you can do that with a PC and VNC as well, not just Macs.

I have a friend who is a bit of an audiophile, much more then me at least. I went to him first and he suggested the Apple Airport Express as well. He has 2 or 3 running in his house already. The issue with this, for me, is that I don't already have one. Which means I would need to buy one making the solution not free for me :(. I am cheap, free first - if it sucks then I will pay :D. If I do go to multiple zones eventually from what I have read so far, adding an AAE is probably the cheapest way to go.

Thanks!