My wife and I have a decent MP3 collection that we have built up over the years. My wife wanted to listen to the music while she was working but she works from home on a regular basis. She didn't want to create duplicate playlists: one at home and one at work.
I did a little research and found an old project that I used to use. The project is called Ampache. Ampache is an open source lamp application that manages your MP3 collection. It can create playlists that can be streamed to the music player of your choice. It also contains a flash player in the event that your corporate firewall won't allow media players to connect to the internet. Ampache supports a feature called Local Play. Local Play allows you to stream the music to a media player that is on the local lan of your Ampache server.
Streaming to work was not an issue. My wife could use the media player of her choice. Ampache streams by sending a playlist file. Every song on your playlist shows up in your media player, so you can skip or repeat a song natively.
For Local Play, I had to install MPD on my living room computer. I was able to configure Ampache to connect to MPD and start playing music. It took me a little while to get used to switching between the Flash player and Local Play.
The browse interface has a little quirk. The pager uses ajax to switch between page one and page two. If I click an artist, then hit the back button, I go back to page one. It was a little annoying, so I started to open links in new tabs (I like tabs). I end up with 5 tabs open, but adding items to the playlist will stomp on the playlists in the other tabs. Its just something I need to get used to.
Users can create and share multiple playlists. You can make a playlist for your various moods and listen to them in almost any location. There are mobile apps/plugins available to allow you to stream music on the road. If you are lucky enough to have an unlimited data plan, you can stream the playlists to your phone from anywhere. The mobile apps don't allow you to act as a remote control for Local Play.
Ampache is a great tool for the home cloud. The interface is pretty polished and easy to use. It enables to you to access and organize your music wherever you are. I do wish there was a mobile app that allows me to use Local Play. I would also like a playlist pre-sync where I can download every song on a playlist over wifi so that I can go to the gym and not use my data plan.
The browse interface has a little quirk. The pager uses ajax to switch between page one and page two. If I click an artist, then hit the back button, I go back to page one. It was a little annoying, so I started to open links in new tabs (I like tabs). I end up with 5 tabs open, but adding items to the playlist will stomp on the playlists in the other tabs. Its just something I need to get used to.
Users can create and share multiple playlists. You can make a playlist for your various moods and listen to them in almost any location. There are mobile apps/plugins available to allow you to stream music on the road. If you are lucky enough to have an unlimited data plan, you can stream the playlists to your phone from anywhere. The mobile apps don't allow you to act as a remote control for Local Play.
Ampache is a great tool for the home cloud. The interface is pretty polished and easy to use. It enables to you to access and organize your music wherever you are. I do wish there was a mobile app that allows me to use Local Play. I would also like a playlist pre-sync where I can download every song on a playlist over wifi so that I can go to the gym and not use my data plan.
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