w3juke - Streaming Audio Player

What is w3juke?

Briefly put, w3juke reads audio data files from one or more data sources (web server(s) or local files) and streams them into a locally configured playback programs. It will randomly select the different music tracks to be played based off your preferences. It has a history mechanism to avoid playing any audio tracks that have been recently played. It has a sophisticated rating system for tracks that allows the end user to assign ratings to the tracks, discs, or artists to influence how often that music will be played. It also has a highly optimized data buffering implementation to deal with slow Web servers, broken connections, and lossy TCP channels.

Requirements:

Building w3juke requires the GTK+ and GTK-- libraries. Playback programs are also required -- one for each type of data stream that you want to listen to. Typically this will be a compiled, native executable, command line program, such as mpg123, or ogg123. Last but not least, you need to have a source of audio data files - either from a set of webservers or as files available through a locally mounted filesystem.

The w3juke program is pretty stable. It gets run all day long and normally it dumps core less then once a month. Then again, this has only really been tested against a relatively small set of web servers.

Documentation:

There is some reasonable configuration information available. There are currently three documents available.

Configuration File Format

This document fully describes the syntax and format of the per-user configuration file. Very useful for the end user to understand.

Index File Format

This document attempts to describe the format of the Index Files that w3juke user.

Helper application operations

This document attempts to describe how to use the helper application

Get It!

You can get prepackaged files from SourceForge, or if you are a bit more adventurous you can get the most recent version via CVS. Here's a brief set of instructions as to how to get the source code from CVS:

• Setup a anonymous cvs password. You should need to do this the very first time you access the cvs server. When prompted for the password, just hit return:

  cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.w3juke.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/w3juke login 
  

• Get the source code.

  cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.w3juke.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/w3juke get w3juke
  

• Build it:

  make depend
  make
  

Screenshots:

Future directions

• Drag n' Drop from web browsers and stuff. That is, if a helper-app is good enough, then this is pretty much done.
• Out of the box compiling on non-Red Hat Linux systems (Debian at least).
• Good ideas you all come up with and send patches for, or at least tell us about.

Things that have already been done

• IPv6 support (already working in an experimental version, but the patches didn't make it back to me yet, and that version does not have a fallback to IPv4)
• Remote site config made easy!
• Remote control (so it'll be easy for xlock/xautolock to pause the music).

email: w3juke at pix.net
$Date: 2001/09/28 22:24:50 $