Remember Ricochet? It's a CDPD-like wireless modem service that's available in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Washington DC, and a few smaller spatterings elsewhere.

Well, since I just moved to the Bay Area, I went and checked them out again. It seems that they're gearing up for launch of their 128kbps service. All you can eat for $70/month. Should be ready sometime in June, they say -- sounds like about the time I'm going to get my Mark 2. Hmm...

Now, what's the most popular encoding rate for MP3s? 128kbps, you say? Hmmmm...

I can see myself writing a simple Napster client for an anything-on-demand empeg.

Drool.

Droooool.

Alex

First off, this is a kick-ass idea.

However, I wouldn't do "on demand", I would do "one song past demand", e.g., "request this song, and it fetches in the background whilst the current song plays". You're not going to see "guaranteed" 128kbps, so if you do it on demand, you either have to come up with strong buffering and such, or dump it off to a file, add that file to the playlist all while the "current" song is playing.

But that would require a little bit of help from the Empeg boys, methinks.

Also, you might consider using GNUtella as your model, only because Napster /may( not)?/ be around much longer.

Insert obligatory anti-Metallica-lawsuit rhetoric here - http://www.metallicasucks.com/ -

Yeah, it probably wouldn't be technically on-demand, but a 30-sec to 1-min buffer should work okay. I guess I'll see how good the service is when it gets here, and start hacking.

I have quite a bit of programming experience, some of that hackish, but little Linux experience, and no Empeg experience, so I can't really say whether it's feasable or not from the Empeg standpoint, but it's so cool that I hope that "the boys" build in any necessary hooks. :)

3rd-party programs should be able to manipulate playlists and current songs anyway. That seems like a no-brainer.

Re Napster vs. gnutella, I've had little personal success with gnutella, and much with Napster. The interesting thing about Napster is OpenNap, an open-source Napster server:

http://opennap.sourceforge.net/

I already use several OpenNap servers, and I suspect that if Napster runs into difficulty, the number of OpenNap servers will increase dramatically.

Gnutella has some pretty big problems with scalability as currently implemented.

An extra Napster bonus is that it gives you bitrate and length information -- useful for verifying a streamable file, and verifying that it's the "proper" length -- since without a good interface, I suspect that the software will have to be intelligent about which file to pick, switch servers if one is being too slow, etc.

Alex

Just wondered if you'd got any further with this cool idea?

I'm about to trade my ancient Ricochet for a new one, so this might work for me

Cheers,
Richard