This is sort of a silly project I did a while back. I have a machine that has really good speakers and a sub woofer, so the speakers can be very loud, and you can hear it all through my house. Well, I decided, why not make an MP3 server?



My LAN has more speaker power than my Stereo system, so it seemed fun.



Now that I have had it done for a while, I'm going to show you all how to do this.



It's fairly easy to do, but you do need good speakers for it to work right, or it would be a bit pointless.



I think you could do this in Windows if you tried and searched hard enough, but I used SlackWare 9.1.



To start:



Install Slackware Linux 9.1 by reading my tutorial, or installing it yourself. Either way will work fine.



Configure Linux for your network, and make sure SSH is allowed. If you have a firewall on the Linux box, make sure SSH is allowed on that too. After you configure the machine, make sure you have something like mpg123. This is a command line tool for playing music that works quite well. Get Putty if you have any Windows machines on the network, so you can access the Linux box with SSH.



After you have configured the machine, boot it up, and then log in to it with SSH from another box to be sure that it works.



It should work fine, as I have really never had to do much configuration to make it work out of the box.



I have tested this project in SuSE, Slackware, and Madrake. I'd imagine it would work fine in others, but these are what I have used so far for this.



If you are starting a fresh install, make sure you have the command line music players, and some CD-Ripper software. Afrer you have the OS installed, configured, and SSH is working, start loading the box with CDs, and ripping them. Ogg vorbis .ogg files also work well, so you don't HAVE to use MP3s. If you want it to go faster, you could always download a crap load of MP3s while you are also ripping music to the HD.



When this completes, or you are happy with the amount of music you have on the machine already, just check to be sure no spaces are in the names of the directories or songs. If you see spaces, rename the files without spaces. This is so you can play the files from the command line.



When you have that done, turn the speakers up, go to another machine, log in with SSH, and type the following (Assuming you have this song on your HD):



mpg123 LordsOfAcid-LetsGetHigh.mp3



Hit enter, and you should hear the song start up.

Nice how you can turn a $5,000.00 LAN into a CD player that would cost $200.00 huh? :O)