jkOnTheRun love the Pandora music streaming solution and quite rightly so. These music discovery services are very good.
The service I’ve been using for the last 2 years is Last.FM. but there’s a whole bunch of them out there.
- MusicStrands
- Liveplasma
- UpTo11.net
- Audiri
- Pandora
- Mercora
- Yahoo LAUNCHcast Radio
- Last.fm
At first I just started using Last.FM to browse for new music related to my own tastes but over time I’ve been listening more and more to the streams that are available. I won’t go into too much detail about Last.FM as ExtremeTech have already done a good comparison of the services. The problem with a lot of these streaming services is that you need to run an application that registers, receives an authorisation code and then fetches the stream. Not something that’s easy to integrate into Windows player or Winamp without a plugin. Most services provide their own player which works but isn’t very integrated in my opinion. There is a solution though.
How about integrating recommendation services with your complete music collection? With Internet radio stations. And podcasts. With multi client capability, a database backend and an Internet-accessible, touch and small-screen refined interface? All using just one software front-end on your device?
Slimserver is your friend! It makes a great music streaming solution for any mobile device with a browser and an audio player.
Slimserver is a multi-platform digital music streaming/re-streaming and database package that is used as the backend for the rather tasty Slimdevices/Logitech Transporter and Squeezebox products.
I’ve been using Slimserver as a streamig application for at least 2 years with a standard shoutcast-capable client (Winamp mostly). I originally used it to stream my music as MP3s to my work location but I’ve also used it to stream music into the car and while on holiday via a PocketPC. No need to take 80GB of music with you, just go ‘thin’ and take a simple shoutcast/icecast-capable media player. (TCPMP is my recommendation for pocket PC’s/WM5 as its very light on processor usage.) Its a Slingbox for music.
I’ve also integrated it into my MythTV-based PVR as a radio station and recently, onto the i7210 and Pepperpad UMPC. The beauty of this solution is that it requires nothing more than your browser to set up the stream and then a normal media player on the client side. On the server side you need to install the Slimserver software but under Linux its never presented me with any major problems and I understand that it’s even easier on Windows.
The server interface is accessed via a normal browser and uses the built-in Web server in the SlimServer package. It allows you to setup streams and features for any of the clients currently or previously registered with the server. It has a number of style options and below you can see the superb ‘touch’ interface style which sits very well in the full-screen mode of Firefox 2. The images below are full-screen shots. Not cropped. Under ie7 there are a few positioning issues that need to be sorted out.
Below is the radio interface and you can see that I’ve installed the LastFM plugin along with some standard services that are provided. I’ve also installed the plugin that feeds back my listening info to Last.FM where it continues to refine my personal stations and neighbors with similar music tastes.
Could it be any simpler? That’s what I like about it. If you want to play music, you want to play music. You don’t want visualisations, voting and a million other distractions.
The web-based interface/player client combination is extremely simple to set up but it does have one small problem. Most audio players buffer a lot of the stream and to try and change tracks can mean either a long wait or a stop/start operation. Fear not though, there is another solution which uses the control interface on the server to provide both the control and playback capability in one easy interface. Its the SoftSqueeze player/controller and it basically emulates a Slim Devices Squeezebox. Its useable via touch of course and there are a nice set of skins and some keyboard shortcuts. The skins aren’t quite optimised for touch on the 7″ screens of UMPCs but I guess it wouldn’t take much to re-develop the skin to the correct size. Maybe if I donate enough to the project, Richard Titmuss the developer will make me a Carrypad logo ultra mobile PC skin. Maybe there’s even someone out there reading this that could knock one up?
One of the really amazing and, to my knowledge, unique features of the Slimdevices solution is that it’s able to syncronise more than one client. You can group clients and what you do on one client gets echoed to the rest of the group. As I write this, I have the i7210 and the Pepperpad running Softsqueeze 3 and they are playing the same playlist and are totally in sync. I’m amazed at this as, having done a fair bit of TCP/IP work in the past, I know it’s not easy. I guess it’s because of the IP-based control channel on the server software that the clients can feed back status information to the server. Truly a multi-room solution. I will be trying this out at a party I’m holding in a few weeks time. I’ll see if I can get the eo i7210 running in the living room and the Pepperpad running out in the garden with some powered speakers. The neighbors are going to love me.
The SoftSqueeze player and control software. Ideal for mobile Devices
A few other features I find interesting:
- Its free and open source.
- Support for bit-rate limiting on a per-client basis.(so you can limit to, say, 48kps for your mobile phone client or let it free run up to 320kbps
- Supports a large number of file formats.
- Has iTunes integration (don’t ask me about this, I don’t use it!)
- Supports HTTP auth and IP address filtering.
- Auto library rescan.
- MySQL back-end (at least on the Linux version.)
There is a downside. Its quite revealing about your musical tastes if you use the ‘scrobbler’ plugin to feed back your musical choices to Last.FM. Most people don’t like to know that they are average! Its a bit like that option on TiVo I’ve heard about that auto-records things it thinks you like. Most people turn it off after getting a hard drive full of Friends, The Simpsons and early morning movies!!! Finally, if you want to refine a good history you’ll keep the solution ‘personal.’ My wife’s musical tastes would definitely throw up a red flag on my profile at Last.FM. They definitely don’t merge well with mine.
One addition I’d like to make to my setup here is the an A2DP audio gateway to my amplifier so that I could send the audio over Bluetooth and not have worry about wires for the audio output. Maybe soon. I’m looking at this at the moment. The Hama RX2. Has anyone had any experience with these A2DP gateways? How good is the quality in comparison to, say, an FM broadcast or a CD.
I’ll risk embarrassment now by putting up my live playlist from Last.FM. If you see David Hasselhof appear on the list, its an error. Obviously.
And by the way. If you use Pandora, Live365, Moodlogic or Rhapsody, there are official plugins available for those services too.
Regards.
Steve / Chippy
