Over on the Empeg Car BBS, we were talking about the new HSX-109, and Peter said this:

Someone really needs to write a Receiver client plugin for Winamp. Someone's needed to for a while, in fact -- but someone really needs to now the audio centre is released.

That way, you can use either the Rio Receiver server or the HSX-109 to serve other PCs as well as Rio Receivers.

The protocols are well documented. Who's up to it?

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Tony Fabris

Sorry, not got the skills to even know where to start. But its something that would sure be handy, and would help sales of the Reciever.
Although if you music is all on your home LAN, then why not just connect directly to it ?

- --
Rod, UK Empeg Mk2 64Gb & Mk2a 96Gb 2xDell Digital Audio Receiver - Wireless

Although if you music is all on your home LAN, then why not just connect directly to it ?

True. However, there might be situations when a Receiver Streamer is what you want instead. Examples:

- You aren't using a PC to serve the music, you are using an HSX-109.

- You don't want to use open shares on your network because those are a security risk in some situations, and also an opening for certain viruses to spread.

- You are running the Linux or Java versions of the Receiver server software on a machine that isn't running a Samba server.

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Tony Fabris

And like I said over on the empeg BBS, you don't need to. It's HTTP already.

Later internal versions of the Receiver software serve up HTML navigation pages, and will generate M3U playlists on the fly for you.

"Later" in this instance wasn't sufficient to get that code included in the server software that ships with the HSX-109.

Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

That is exceptionally cool. So can you give an example of how I might format a URL to stream a file off of the server?

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Tony Fabris

See http://www.differentpla.net/~roger/empeg/receiver/ for more information.

Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Edited by Roger on 18/12/01 10:43 PM.

Cool! Thanks!

By the way, the URL turned out to be http://www.differentpla.net/~roger/empeg/receiver/, but I figgered it out.

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Tony Fabris

I had a play with the stuff in Rogers website.

I managed to get a song out of my Database into Winamp [v2.77] but I had to create a playlist from a m3u file [well actually I created a m3u file in winamp, then imported the m3u file into the Receiver Manager software].

When I play a song I notice that Winamp appears to download the whole song to the temporary internet directory then play it from there - not quite 'streaming' as we might understand it!

I also had a play with querying the database and found that a http request http://...:12078/query?artist= will give a text list of all artists in all mp3 files in the database and http://...:12078/query?title= gives a list of all unique songs in the database
and http://...:12078/query?path= gives a list of all unique mp3 files [with original mp3 filename included on the server].

Also, http://...:12078/tags gives a list of the valid tags you can search on.

Question is: how do I create playlists from the queries above - presumably I need to do a http post of some sort, but what are the query string values I need to provide?

Also, once you select a Playlist the queries now only search within the playlist, so how do you reset back to the full list of files [i.e. do not have an active playlist?].

Other than that, it looks like a way to control the Receiver Manager for both the Rio Receiver AND the HSX 109 within Winamp [3.X at least] is do-able.

One thing - it appears that the Receiver Manager has a SSDP 'resource' file it returns to the Rio Receiver so that the Receiver knows whats configured where, whats the URL we need to send to the Receiver Manager server to get this?
I tried :12078/descriptor.xml but that doesn't work [404 error].
This information might be useful to make the winamp plugin more self configuring.

When I play a song I notice that Winamp appears to download the whole song to the temporary internet directory then play it from there - not quite 'streaming' as we might understand it!

I notice that when I feed the URL directly to WinAmp ("Play Location"), it begins playing instantly, as if it were truly streaming. I didn't check to see if it was storing a temporary copy of the file anywhere.

On the other hand, if I feed the URL to Internet Explorer, then it does download the whole file and then hands the file to WinAmp.


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Tony Fabris

It would make sense for this case if Winamp did save the file then play it - that way it gets the ID3 tag information [if its not provided up-front in the stream].

My only question/comment would be - does Winamp delete the file when its done with it - if not then your hard disk will fill up with [copies of] all the mp3s you listen to from the Receiver Manager software.

if the files are in "temporary internet files", then the amount of space consumed by this directory is settable in the Internet Explorer settings and older files will get pruned as time goes by.

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Tony Fabris

If you put the URL in IE, then IE will download it to a temporary file, which Winamp then plays.

If you use the +URL button in Winamp, then it's streamed directly.

If you want to play the entire playlist, just create an M3U (or PLS) file containing the list of URLs. If you then play this in Winamp, it'll stream each file, one after the other. If you use Winamp's enhanced M3U format, it'll let you specify the tags in the playlist, rather than having to read the ID3 tags -- an ideal opportunity for a spot of Perl hacking, surely?


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg