Help us stop fighting over what music is playing in the office!

March 10, 2009 9:09 AM

What's your favorite solution for sharing music (and control thereof) at the office or similar environment? Specifically, some sort of LAN or web controllable "server" type solution?

We've been sharing via iTunes, but it requires one person to keep adding things to the playlist, and invariably he/she sticks to his/her own collection even though we have our libraries shared.

We're not married to iTunes or anything. We're okay with Windows and Linux. We have a mac or two lying around here. We could dedicate a machine to it if necessary, or just install something on one of our machines.

Ideally, some sort of web interface that lets other people queue up music (or even vote?) would be ideal. We've seen, but have not yet tried, tunez, but before going to the effort of setting that one up I'd like to see what else is out there, hear opinions on it, etc...

posted by twiggy to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Though your requirements are not entirely clear, if you are not adverse to a bit of setup, slim server, an open source solution by the makers of Squeeze Box is free to use. It does take a bit of network magic to make it hum, but is well worth it IMO.

What I've done in the past is set up the server on one machine and stream out to VLC. Let me know if you have any questions...
posted by |n$eCur3 at 10:18 AM on March 10

To clarify, we basically just want to have a jukebox of sorts that anyone in the office can add to the playlist of... so that music isn't entirely chosen by one person for the day...

Web-accessible would be ideal... but isn't necessary...
posted by twiggy at 10:24 AM on March 10

Slim server will work for your purposes, as long as you dump ALL music files onto the same box as your server.
posted by |n$eCur3 at 10:59 AM on March 10

Are you looking for something that balances queues or are you just assuming that everyone will be a good little citizen and not queue up 17 hours of Mr. Bungle? If it's the latter, I don't see why you can't just set up a machine with remote desktop or VNC somewhere and using any old music player.
posted by valadil at 12:21 PM on March 10

Slimserver's web interface allows for queuing and is generally a user-friendly interface. There's also plenty of other interfaces for talking to the server.

Any music player that can connect to a http stream is capable of using Slimserver. You'll need at least one client as Slimserver isn't capable of playing music by itself. SoftSqueeze is a client packaged with Slimserver.

I'm guessing a standalone computer with speakers is the jukebox? If so what I'd do is:

*Setup a file share on the computer for folks to dump songs. This could be on another computer as long as Slimserver can read the files.
*Install Slimserver (wiki is helpful)
*Launch SoftSqueeze or other music player from the server
   *Point player at http://slimserver_IP:9000/stream.mp3
   *SoftSqueeze will automatically find SlimServer
*Queue songs
*Party

A side benefit from the Slimserver approach is the ability for people to launch their own SoftSqueeze session from their machine and have a private listening party without screwing up the "public" session.
posted by llin at 1:06 PM on March 10

MPD might work for you.
posted by jackmakrl at 1:05 PM on March 12

Just buy everyone an iPhone or iPod Touch.
posted by Tu13es at 6:06 AM on March 13