A-ha; I’ve finally found a decent use for my Linux for Playstation 2 kit (well, at least until I get around to writing a game…)
For a while now I’ve been thinking that if we ever have a party, it would be good to have music, but the problem with party music is that it normally always comes off a CD or tape shoved in a sound system (or at least it does in our household). This is fine, except that each one only lasts about an hour, and then of course you either get an hour of a pre-printed CD, or have to spend AGES putting together compilations.
I’m a fairly late converter to the MP3 thing, but for a while I’ve thought – shove a load of MP3s onto a DVD, throw it in the DVD player (which is meant to be able to handle such things), and hook it up to the sound system.
The obvious next development is to just have all the MP3s on a computer, and hook that up to the sound system instead – but this is where we hit a small snag, in as much as the computer is in the study, and the sound system is in the sitting room. Ok, so there’s spare cat-5 running between the two, but it’s a lot of effort to make all the connectors and run the ‘last mile’ of cable between the wall boxes and the PC/stereo.
So, into the breach steps the Playstation. It lives in the sitting room, and is hooked up to the surround sound; and is the obvious answer! I’ve already got most of my CDs into MP3, as I listen to them at work – so in three easy steps (mount the music over NFS, install the mpd, and hook up the PS2 to the stereo) I’ve got a jukebox I can control either over the web (I’d already got Apache httpd running on it), or directly on the PS2 console.
Job done.