A dash of mplayer.

Thinking about getting a stereo  for the office area, but really did not want to spend any money if I could use an old pc.Love to play free open source royalty free music.  If you think about it, the footprint of a stereo is like a pc but without the monitor. Maybe I could just use an old Linux box to get the job one.

Then I thought would it be nice if I could lt the pc stereo stand alone and then access it from a remote machine.  Something linux can do very easily using the ssh environment. Installed a switch and ran the cables from the desk top to the music server. You could also do this via wifi, but that can be a security issue.

Once you have everything set up, you will want to move your music files and then organize your music in some way before starting the shell command.

so 
$ ssh oeorgan1

$ sudo apt-get install mplayer

Execute the shell command to play all the sonegs in the subdirectories from the main subdirectory. Note: if you know how to use the screen command, you can enhance your control a lot easier.

eddie@oeorgan1:/var/media/music$ mplayer -really-quiet -playlist <(find $PWD -type f)

Then you can use various keyboard commands to control the music. The ones I use most are:

<shift> >     next song
<shift> <     previous song
p                   pause
r                    continue
<control> c  stop

Here are two keyboard formats that might be of interest.

Like Alton Brown of "Good eats" fame, he detests single use appliances, Since computers are good at doing more than one thing, you take your pc stereo system and add web, mail, file and a host of other programs to make the systems more versatile. Let us see whether your garden variety stereo can do that.


If you wanted something more interactive, you could install something like xvnc or xrdp and rim something like rhythmbox or whatever.

You might want to generate a playlist so you can use mplayer from the command line.

$ find -name ".ogg" > songlist

Once you have your playlist

$ mplayer -playlist songlist