WiFi LAN Jukebox

Well, I finally got the jukebox up and running. For anyone who is interested, I will run through the setup that includes the WiFi, the server, the laptops, my Zaurus, and SourceForge.

UPDATE: I have since switched the software to tunez, which has the playlist voting, random play, and browse by artist/title/genre that I was hoping for.

The concept was to build a WiFi LAN within the apartment, and then be able to access the library of mp3s I have stored in my desktop slave drive from any machine, including my Sharp Zaurus SL-C750.

1. I run Fedora Core 1 on an HP Pavillion 450. First, I created a mount point with mkdir /mnt/juke. The mp3s, unfortunately, were on a Windows (vfat) formatted secondary drive, which means I needed to add this to my /etc/fstab file:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/juke vfat defaults 0 0
This let me access this drive from a Linux environment.

2. I then needed to patch Fedora to be able to read and decode mp3 files (patches can be found in a lot of places by typing “fedora” and “mp3″ into google). So far, so good.

3. The next step was to find a suitable jukebox application. I ran through some candidates at Sourceforge (there are plenty), but finally settled on gnump3d written and maintained by Steve Kemp out of the UK. gnump3d is actually built for streaming, which I thought might be nice down the road– but Steve’s code seemed very mature, stable, and easily installable– which is what I wanted my first time out. (I should note that I had some questions, and Steve responded quickly, politely, and had great insight– thanks Steve!)

4. After some wrestling with the config files for gnump3d, and updating mpg321 on my system, I got it working– but only in a streaming environment. I wanted a jukebox. I noticed in the config file for gnump3d the following section:

##
#
# This is an experimental feature - ignore it.
#
# It does not work.
#
# Ignore it: You are not expected to understand this (I've always wanted
# to leave that as a comment somewhere ;)
#
##
#
jukebox_mode = 1
jukebox_player = /usr/bin/mpg123 $FILENAME
#
##

A hah! So there is a jukebox feature in here, but it is disabled! I uncommented this and gave it a shot, only to get a failure at line 1576 or something (I cannot remember the exact line), which lead to this portion of the app:

#
# Evil. Hack.
# TODO: Fixme.
#
system( $jukebox_binary , $safeFile );

exit;
}

but no go. I pinged Steve, who suggested changing to this:

system( "/usr/bin/mpg321 $safeFile" );

BINGO!!!! I could now cruise through the mp3s via any web browser, select a tune, and play it back through the speakers hooked to the sever.

5. Now for the Sharp Zaurus. I am still running the factory ROM on mine, because it supports the Japanese-English-Kanji dictionary SD card I bought, (which is a help for me while I read the paper). Sharp Zaurus are tricky with LAN cards– although there are many available, most are expensive Air-H cards that come with monthly cell-packet programmes (around $30/month) that I didn’t really need. I just wanted a simple LAN card, dammit. BIcCamera in Shinjuku sold me a Corega WLCFL-11 for about US$70 (I actually had enough points stored up so it was “free”). The guy at the store warns me that I will need to install the driver, to which I say “no problem” (famous last words…)

As it turns out, this WiFi card is meant for WinCE PDAs, and the entire manual, instructions, install CD are of absolutely no use to me. Once again, Google saves the day, and I find this link on the corega support page for corega-wlcfl_1.0_arm.ipk
(my apologies for the direct link, but as the page is in Japanese, the source page may be of little use to many people out there). This works! I can now access the LAN, and thus select tunes from the sofa (instead of gettingup, walking about 3 meters, and change them directly on the server).

6. EVENTUALLY, I hope to install an aethernet-based HD (160GB), and put all the tunes, movies, etc. in there, and then simply put the server in the closet somewhere (the wife doesn’t like the asthetics of it that much), and simply select a song, movie, or photo, then choose the output (stereo, television, local browser, email, etc.)

Good luck!