linux audio jukebox

I've recently started a linux audio jukebox project. Here's the story....

It all started when someone I know and love handed me one of their old laptops and said "Will you destroy the data on this hard drive for me? You can use it if you want, or donate it to a thrift store, whatever." of course, I said "Yes!!" I added it to my pile of electronics and put in an action item to wipe the hard drive.

Then...the gears started turning. As long as I'm wiping the hard drive, why not install another OS? As I was wondering what to do with this machine, my wife mentioned that she might like a docking station for her mp3 player.....and the idea hatched.

The plan:
Ok. First, I have to see if this is even something that's worth doing. So, in the first phase, the goal is to spend as little money as possible--holding off on upgrades as long as possible until I know what will be the most beneficial upgrades, and really whether or not we will even use this thing. So, the plan is something like this:

Proof of Concept: Figure out how to get it running.

Small implementation: Throw it in the bedroom and see if we use it.

Medium implementation: Upgrade speakers. Add some sort of 'remote control' interface. Improve video interface. Probably will need to add another, larger hard drive (external?).

Large implementation (the dream phase): In-wall speakers in every room (because of interference in my area, wireless is NOT AN OPTION). Massive streaming audio server and several 'client' modules of some form. Integrated with a similarly massive video streaming service. Support for recording audio....oooooohhhhh, that opens a whole new can of worms. Hey, we can all dream, right?

The machine:
This is an HP laptop with a PIII and 128 MB of RAM :(. There is a 20GB (19) hard drive on it. Not exactly a monster. I have another HP configured similarly, but with a bad monitor. So, the first thing that happened (before idea hatching phase) was that this machine went under the knife and donated its monitor to the other box. Now I had a spare web-surfin' Win2000 box. So, this box is under-gunned and with a bad monitor. The USB port got destroyed at some point, so that's going to be an issue...

Wiping the hard drive:
I didn't want to just install Linux on top of the old messed up Win2000 install (the passwords had long since been forgotten, etc.). So, I had to wipe it. I remembered reading an article on lifehacker about just this sort of thing, so a quick search turned up DBAN and I was ready to kill some disk. DBAN did its thing with no trouble and soon (ok, it wasn't soon, it took quite a while, but I was doing something else, so who cares) I had a clean drive.

New OS:
My brother works at Novell and mentioned that they had just released a new version of SuSE. So, it got installed. On some sites, they'd give instructions on how to do this, but the install was entirely uneventful, other than assigning a password for root. So, I'd say skip the instructions and just install it. I chose Gnome as my desktop. I might have been better off choosing KDE....not really sure.

Monitor:
I mentioned that the old monitor was bad. You would boot up, start running, and the monitor would blank out and it would look like the computer was sleeping. You'd try to 'unsleep' the computer and end up in a real mess. Eventually, I figured out that the computer itself wasn't sleeping--just that the monitor was a bit narcoleptic. So, for now, I've hauled up an ancient 21" monitor from the basement. It weighs 3 tons and I had to have a crane move it for me (ha ha). It absolutely dwarfs the rest of the room, and will clearly NOT be a permanent solution, but that's what we have, and now I can see what's going on. For the next phase, I'm hoping to score a cheap cable or something to send the output to a TV (my laptop doesn't currently have s-video). I haven't really looked into this much yet. I'm sure there are some issues I haven't foreseen.

RAM:
This was the one event during the SuSE install. I know, I said it was uneventful, but I lied. The install CD told me that 128MB wasn't enough. So....remember how I mentioned that this machine has a Win2000 twin? Well, the twin donated a kidney (another 128MB of RAM). So, we are up to 256 for now (but the twin is hurting with only 128MB for itself). If we get past the Proof of Concept phase, this has to be one of the first upgrades.

Audio player:
Ok, so now that we are running an OS and have a monstrous 20 GB hard drive freed up, it's time to start ripping CD's and listening to the library. Initially, I was going to use JaJuk as my player/jukebox software, but it needs to allocate 64MB of RAM up front, and my system doesn't have it to spare. If we go to 512, I will take another look at Jajuk.

So, I fire up the audio player that came with SuSE/GNOME (I think it's called Helix Banshee or something like that), throw in a CD to rip and wait...............a really long time. Checking the system stats, the CPU and RAM were doing fine, so I concluded that it was just the ancient CD drive lagging. Hmmmm.....my main XP box is a lot faster at ripping.....

Samba Server:
The SuSE/GNOME install had a slick interface for configuring a Samba Server. A few clicks (I haven't configured one before) and I was pushing all of my audio files from my XP box down to the new SuSE box. It still takes longer to rip than I'd like, but since the XP box rips in half the time, now I can rip 3 discs in the time it took to rip one (2 on the XP box and 1 on the Linux box). If I ever buy more RAM, I can get the win2000 twin up on the Samba server connection and hopefully have three machines ripping at once--all storing their data on the Linux Jukebox machine. I'll probably have some I/O problems about then....

Speakers:
For now, just using some crappy PC speakers. Scouring thrift stores and pawn shops for the next upgrade....This upgrade may actually come as part of the Proof of Concept phase.

Amplifier:
I have an older donated (people with cool electronics give me their old stuff when they are de-cluttering) Kenwood 100W amp. My first monetary investment in this system was a $7 patch cord to go from the headphone jack on the laptop to RCA audio jacks.

USB:
Eventually, I have to replace the USB port or find a card with one or something. It would be a tragedy to have this great jukebox and not be able to update the mp3 player from it (especially since the mp3 player was part of the initial inspiration).

Summary:
So far, I've got about 700 tracks loaded, consuming about 30% of my hard drive. I'd like to keep the consumption under 85% to allow for some wiggle-room, so I think I can get up to around 1500 tracks. I've had a blast listening to music that I haven't pulled out in a long time, and I'm quite happy with the 'system' -- even with its puny speakers, etc. I've shown my wife what I've been wasting my time on, and she is somewhat impressed. Once I have speakers and am running through the Kenwood amp, I'm going to call the proof of concept phase complete. Then, we'll look at investing more $$ to get the other upgrades.

--Og