Not a toy, exactly.
I only have one power adapter for my iPod and so get worried when I bring it to work and want to listen. If I work 9 hours straight, it will conk out after around 5, leaving me with no music for four, which would be a tragedy of course.
So what happens is that I go without music for a few hours, and then I get tied up in things and don’t want to stop for the 30 seconds that it will take to untangle the headphones (or grab another pair from my desk) and choose an appropriate playlist, adjust the volume, etc., and don’t listen to any music until it’s time to go home.
The easy solution is to buy another power adapter for $40. I already have an extra firewire cord, though I might want another at $18.
The more interesting solution is to realize that the music on my iPod is a reflection of the music on my computer and, hey, I’m sitting in front of a computer with broadband all day and we have broadband at home.
So I installed ZINA on my Powerbook and fiddled with the Apache (web server) configuration to make it serve my music files (4 kinds; more on that below). ZINA does a lot of things, but I only needed it to do two: set up an online directory of my music, which is already sorted into folders by artist and album by iTunes, and create playlist files pointing to the music files’ URLs.
ZINA, more or less, does this out of the box. Configure a few things and it JUST WORKS. Then I turned on HTTP basic access control because, of course, I don’t want random yahoos on the ‘Net downloading my music. I wanted to use domain control, so that it just work from my office computer but require a password from other computers. This proved impossible, though, because all traffic has to go through our Wifi router, which makes everything look like local traffic to the webserver (after all, the request is coming from the router). No big deal: passwords are fine and ZINA can add them to the playlist files.
After access control, I set up a dynamic domain. Our IP address at home is dynamic; it changes at Comcast’s whim, which would make it hard to reach teh computer from home. But a bit of software at home now updates our name address whenever the IP address changes. Upshot: grossdog.kicks-ass.net always works, no matter what the underlying address is.
Final step: add support to ZINA for paying attention to AAC-encoded MP4 files. Easy to do, but I forgot it the first time. The box can now stream, with Apache, AAC MP4s, OGGs (which one website I like insists on for some reason), and MP3s. I could make it stream iTunes music store AAC encrypted MP4 files (”.m4p”), but the client computer wouldn’t be able to play them. At least, I can’t see a way to do it without installing iTunes at the office, which I can’t do for now (don’t ask).
How it all works: At the office, I go to http://grossdog.kicks-ass.net and log in. It gives me a music directory. I can choose songs and albums, create playlists, and if I want to, download any music file. For playlists, the usual mode of listening, I tried Windows Media Player. It didn’t work well, and I didn’t like the lack of detailed status information. WinAMP worked great for MP3s, but the interface is too complicated and it doesn’t support streaming MP4 at all (no idea why; should be trivial to do). Quicktime player supports everything but has lots of random, silent bugs. RealOne player actually works the best (especially because it has a configurable buffer; our network here is fast but unreliable; I prefer 4 seconds of silence between songs to random pausing within songs).
Given my interface and file preferences, iTunes for Windows would probably be a better choice, but I can’t install it and I hear it’s a resource hog which is the last thing I need (last count, I had 8 applications and 22 browser windows open).
So now no battery worries, no headphone switching (I can leave 2 nice pairs plugged into my computer: B&O and Grado), and I can leave my iPod at home for Angharad to use at the gym, though I doubt she will as she claims to have created the “perfect mix CD.”
Anyway, maybe I’ll write up ZINA as a blow-by-blow walkthrough for macosxhints.com. I’m sure other people could use this functionality.
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