MediaMonkey forum

Hmm... Never got the PM. No Problem.

Nautme wrote:Hmm... Never got the PM

Just wanted to share that I see that I tend to get PMs stuck in my Outbox here. Reason unknown... I sent a PM to a person like 12 hours ago, and it's still in the Outbox. This PM stuff is not as reliable as ordinary eMail.

For awhile ago I ended up sending the PM in a Thread instead, as I wanted the message to reach the receipient.

Just my two cents...

No worries.

I was looking around for some ASP tag editing code last night and came across three more ASP based online music collection viewers.

One Web MP3 Server - http://www.oneweb.co.uk/ - It seems pretty full featured, but I like the WebMonkey implementation better. It makes use of custom playlists and loads in all music into its own database. I've been unable to actually get mine to play music, but it seems like a nice interface. Maybe it could help you in figuring out custom playlists and dealing with the internal player better. It does make use of a COM object to read MP3 tags. It writes settings to a config.asp file which might help in a better settings presentation in WebMonkey. Also, it handles sessions oddly. It creates an entry in the database to keep track of each session. Kind of interesting.

Andromeda - http://www.turnstyle.com/andromeda/ - This one is basically a directory listing to show your music. It doesn't use a database and the demo is all done in one ASP page. It's not free, but kind of an interesting implementation. One thing it does do is generate images from the ASP page instead of pointing to image files. Not really a speedy implementation, but it allows them to keep everything in one ASP file.

shoutcASP - http://www.skinmaster.co.uk/shoutcasp - This seems to be more of a way to manage a ShoutCast/WinAMP type server, but it does appear to do alot of the things one may want to do with their music collection.

Anyway, just came across these and figured I'd share them.

1) I've seen the one web mp3 server. It seems to have bugs and no longer in development. It has some nice features, but is heavy on the javascript.

2) I assume it makes the images from the mp3 files? That wouldn't be useful for WebMonkey as it has to work standalone. This allows people to host it somewhere without having the music there as well.

Andromeda and ShoutcASP are unknown to me, I will have to check them out.

For a while ago I became aware of 'on-the-fly' transcoding, using STIN STOUT

Example
So instead of sending a 320CBR mp3, you send a 192CBR or far less.

May be useful, as it works with many formats. Anything that has original>wav decoder, can for example be sent as a streamable LAME 56ABR MP3 file.

Do you have a link?

Not really. I found it by studying the code of Jinzora, and Zina

Jinzora
http://www.jinzora.com/

Zina
http://www.pancake.org/zina/index.html

This STIN STOUT information is often mixed into a big 'soup' so it's a bit hard to extract. That's why I wanted to make it a bit easy here, by just showing what you can do on the command line.

Maybe someone have written about it. I frankly do not quite understand it, I just see that it works.

In simplistic terms I think it works like this.

If UserDoNotWantTrancodedFile then
Send User http://server/music/SongAt320CBR.mp3

Else
Send http://server/music/lame --decode SongAt320CBR.mp3 - | lame -abr 56 - > SongAt_56ABR.mp3

End if

Not tested, I just think that's how the process works. Thinking about it, I guess that may not be the case. Need an 'inbetween' thingy there I guess. Zina is quite simple and fairly easy to understand. Jinzora takes more study.

Jinzora seems pretty full featured (and awesome), but it's way too much work for a Windows user. I worked for hours installing PHP, MySQL, and configuring the website, only to have it crash everytime I tried to import my music collection. I finally got it up and working, but only 20% of my collection is available. What a pain.

MediaMonkey and WebMonkey is definitely the easiest way to stream your own collection.

No doubt about you are right about MediaMonkey and WebMonkey!

For you to have Jinzora going too, it is always best to do that one by file path, instead of reading ID3 tags. That's what I've done, and scanning in the whole collection is done in a snap. I suspect you've selected read tags, when scanning the files into the MySQL database. I do not use Jinzora much, as it requires a bit of tuning, and now I have more fun being focused on MM... the 8th wonder of the world. or is it the 9th...

I've tried importing media both ways, either by folder or tag data, and I still end up with a timeout. I'm back to WebMonkey, but like I said Jinzora is pretty slick.

Same here... used a long time to get Jinzora going.. like weeks.
I even reorganized the whole library to suit the \Genre\AlbumArtist\Album\Track# Title
system, which I do not regret having done.

The more I learn about MM the more I love it, and with WebMonkey, what a package!

What's new in the world of WebMonkey? Any new release coming soon?

Sorry, have been rather busy. Also still working out how I will tackle the skinning issues you have brought up. Hopefully I will get some chance next week to pick things up.