LAN music server

This will kind of be a design log for my project. below explains it all

i'm the kind of person who loves music. i almost always have music of some sort playing no matter what i'm doing - hanging out around the house, in the garage working, ect.
I had recently come up with an idea. I'd like to be able to have a music server going in my house that would host all of my music and be able to change the song playing on my entertainment center where ever i am. in the house. there are apps to do this, which is fine but then i'm limited to only myself being able to change. What if i throw a party and someone wants to listen to a country song? Or they are in the club mood and want to hear some good house music. Yes, they can download the same app but no one likes installing useless stuff on their phone. Not to mention you'd have to hope that it works seamlessly on all devices.
It'd need to be accessible through a browser so that all web enabled devices could access it.
I had originally thought of just building and coding it all myself. I was going to use spotify as a base and look into seeing if they offer an API of some sort to build off. I could also get more creative and do some fancy work with a raspberry pi but right now i don't have time for that and i've got a house warming party coming up in a month.
I drew out a design and figured out what i wanted, then i started to research spotify and how easy this was going to be. I ran across something called Mopidy. From its home page: "Mopidy is a music server which can play music both from multiple sources, like your local hard drive, radio streams, and from Spotify and SoundCloud."
It also seems easy to integrate a web based music player into Mopidy. This could be the solution, and would save me hours and days of designing and coding.
As i progress this i'll be posting updates here just incase someone else wants to pursue this.

I mean, how cool would it be to be able to have guests select music they want to listen to while at your house. Let your guests be your dj.

 

It sounds like a cool idea, but it's also way over my head.

 

if mopidy works as smooth as what it's sounding, anyone who can install ubuntu could install everything no prob. going to give it all a shot tonight

 

I'd give mopidy a try first and if it fails, it doesn't sound like something that would be that hard to code. Setup an old laptop with MAMP or WAMP. Use PHP to traverse a directory that contains all your music.

Browsing to http://localhost/music (or whatever you name it) on a users device (granted they're on your wifi) will show the interface with the songs/playlists.

Clicking a song can send an AJAX request to the laptop to begin playing a song on the laptop.

I was thinking the user could just click the MP3 link and BAM, it plays, but that wouldn't be the case. It would just play on the users device, hence the AJAX request to make the laptop play the song rather than the users device.

Sounds like a fun project

 

Ronnie you pretty much just explained the basis of the original plan. i can't wait to try mopidy though.

 

What languages do you work with?

 

A variety of everything. html, php, javascript, actionscript, ajax, sql, way back when i used c++. haven't yet needed to learn anything else but i'll eventually dive into perl i think

 

cool, I love PHP/AJAX combos

 

i feel a lot of people don't use it enough.

 

this sounds pretty cool! i'm using a raspberry pi as a media player but it's just hooked up via usb to an external 2tb hdd. i'm planning on setting it up so all media on my network can be played through it.

pretty fun stuff!

Edit: Currently running OpenELEC as the OS. Supports Apple airplay and there's an Xbmc remote app (free) so I can use my iPhone as the remote.

 

are you using XMBC for it?

 

I built an unraid server with 4 onboard sata ports, added 4 - 3tb drives and bought a Popcorn hour C-300 for my mancave. Anyone with the server address and password can access it with any browser. I have 2 friends that actually stream my media using Plex. I love this setup and it is alot of fun. Sold my Raspberry Pi, it was working using xbmc however the C-300 will play any media file you can throw at it.

 

I was going to recommend Apple TV, but it would only work with iOS devices. I have Apple TV in my house and when we have parties anyone on our WiFi can control it.

 

yeah, OpenELEC is Xbmc-based

 

i'll have to look into plex. heard a little about it but never looked into it.

i looked into roku as well but it wouldn't quite fulfill this need.

 

make sure you keep us updated on this, i wouldn't mind doing something like this in our garage/gameroom when we start building our house.

 

will do! i just got settled into my new house last weekend and haven't unpacked everything. I'm going to dig through some old pc parts i have boxed up and see if i have enough to build a low power server. i may have to use the pc out of the truck for this since all i use anymore is bluetooth from my phone while in the truck anyways.

 

Check out unraid for sure. http://lime-technology.com/ I have friends that use free nas, but unraid seems to run on just about anything and you can mix and match junk drives. It is similar to JBOD.

 

sweet, i'll look into it.
also, mods if this needs to be moved to the tech forum please do so!

 

so i didn't have a chance last night to install anything. but i am going to use my truckpc to power all this. it's an intel atom dual core. 2gb gaming ram. i'll prob start with a 500gb hd since i have a handful laying around. since there's not really a gui to the server i won't need a hefty video card, the on board will work fine.