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Music

I've had a large collection of MP3s for a good while now. Free sites such as mp3.com featured heavily, and more recently EMusic. When I'm using my computer I often have music playing -- and I'm often using my computer.

This posed a question: how can I have the best music playing at all times with the minimum of effort? The answer, of course, was to write a program. These days I use iTunes, but for a long while I used my own MP3 daemon.

It keeps a database of MP3s and any traits I want to associate with them; it allows matching on file names or parts of filenames, or, in fact, any regular expression. It keeps track of how often each MP3 has been played, and whether they've been played recently, and uses this to avoid repetition.

Rather than having an interface, as such, it receives UDP packets -- from localhost only, although this can be extended if you have a particular desire to allow control of your music from over the internet. Each packet contains a single command; have a look at the source for details. A 'SendUDP' class is included to send packets from the command line.

Why is this an advantage? Because I control my music using single clicks of icons on my panel... if I don't like a track, I can always reach the skip button. If I want to listen to a particular artist, I hit another button and type in the name.

Simple, but very effective.

Oh -- one thing. It doesn't actually play any music. That's left to the rather useful mpg321, which it expects to be installed in /usr/bin.

Source: music.tgz

Package: org.davidmorgan.music

Main: org.davidmorgan.music.Main

Requires: /usr/bin/mpg321 -- see their site or substitute another MP3 player