A coupla MP3 jukebox solutions

I’ve been playing with MP3 jukebox solutions. Grind! looks perfect, except for the life of me I can’t get it to work, which puts a bit of a damper on things. It acts like it’s playing, but the sound never comes out of the sound card. The sound card works fine. The www-data account (Apache’s user) has access to the sound card. The MP3 player software runs as www-data. It works fine when I log in and su into the www-data account. But when I hit the web page to control it, the music never plays.
So I’m about to give up for a while and give Gina a look. Gina’s got lots of cool features. But I’d rather have a computer that plays the music rather than streaming it–I want to hook up a headless computer to my stereo. I suppose I could put an MP3 server in my basement and put a headless computer on my stereo and control it remotely using remote X or VNC or something. It doesn’t do scoring of music the way Grind! does, but I think I can hack that in. You know, create another database of songs, assign a score to each, then when it picks a track, discard it if its score is zero, and when it picks one track, pick two instead, play the higher-scored track and put the other one back in the queue (unless it’s a zero, in which case you discard it). I think I can code that. And that way I’ll hear U2’s “I Will Follow” a lot more frequently than U2’s “Mysterious Ways” (which, don’t get me wrong, was a good song… THE FIRST 3 BILLION TIMES I HEARD IT).

And hey, maybe I can figure out how to hack Gina to play the song instead of streaming it. Because it does lots of other cool stuff. Click the link, check it out.

I wrote up a bunch of stuff today but technical difficulties prevent me from posting it. I’ll post tomorrow.