Score!

My Craigslist bot script found a Squeezebox MP3 player with the enhanced screen for $20! This is the 3rd Squeezebox deal I got off Craigslist. The first I got several years ago for $35. The 2nd I found for $10, but it had a broken display & IR receiver. However, the folks at SlimDevices GAVE me a free replacement screen & IR receiver. Of course, those guys rock. This latest Squeezebox is replacing my office Rio Receiver and is paired with a ThingFling Altec Lansing SoundBar.

AMEX Wishlist Goodies

I scored a few goodies from the AMEX wishlist promotion that was running. One of them was a $150 statement credit for a purchase from BestBuy. That went to buying a new HDTV. I also got a 25% off Amazon coupon - apparently it's good until 1/15/09 and can be used until the maximum discount is reached. Among things I got is the Antenna Direct DB4 antenna. It works great indoors bringing in HD signals that are over 40 miles from our house. I am contemplating other purchases to take advantage of this - possibly the HDHomerun and some Sage stuff (software & extender). Finally, a friend of mine snagged the Squeezebox Boom for me. It's very cool.

Slim Devices rocks!

I found a deal on an original Slim Devices Squeezebox ($10!!!), but it had a broken screen and IR receiver. I contacted Slim Devices' tech support to see if they offered replacements. I had fully expected them to charge for the parts. Instead, they offered the IR daughterboard and screen assembly for free! Since their office is nearby, I was able to drive over during lunch and pick up the parts. I have to say, that is amazing customer support!

Now, I've got 2 fully functional Squeezebox 1s to go along with 2 of the original SliMP3s.

Voice controlled music players revisited

Previously, I mentioned using voice recognition to control our mp3 players. I've been slowly adding playlists to the TellMe app and that seems like the way I'm going to go. It's scaling OK so far and I'm limiting options to our most played music anyway. One annoying thing about the app is for some unknown reason, it destroys the config file. It seems to happen if the machine crashes unexpectedly or the app crashes. I've been making backups of the config file so this hasn't been a major problem yet.

Voice controlled music players

Lately I've been contemplating how to voice control our audio players. The VR part will be HAL. The link from HAL will be scripts that issue xPL commands to the Rio Receivers and SliMP3s/Squeezebox. I will write a script to build the voice commands for playlists/artists/etc, but I have two options to use. I can build them into HAL tasks using my scripts, or build the commands into Tell Me, a HALi app. I think it might be easier to build and update the Tell Me database, but I'm not sure how stable the app is.

One of the problems I'm grappling with will be the size of the command database. I won't be voice activating every artist/album/track/playlist/genre, just the ones we use the most. With 7 players, we have 7 zones and I can easily see the number of voice commands exploding ("Play Metallica in the garage", "Play Metallica in the family room", etc). If I have 1000 playlists/albums/artists then there would be 7000 recognition phrases, but this would be the easiest to generate and requires no logic at all. Which would make it perfect to put in Tell Me, but would it bog down with that many commands?

Or, I can create some tasks to set a zone ("Set zone to garage", etc.) and then issue the play command ("Play Angels & Airwaves"). Then, I'd have 7 zone commands and 1000 playlist/album/artist commands. That's a lot less, but I'd need to keep track of the zone for the subsequent play command. That seems like it would be better suited for HAL since Tell Me can't access variables, and the zone would probably be stored in a variable. However, HAL cannot issue shell commands with variables as parameters, so I would need to link to starCOM via HALi and have sC issue the commands to the music players.

Decisions, decisions... I need to spend some time experimenting with Tell Me.

Perl script to autogenerate playlists from mp3s

I wrote this perl script to autogenerate playlist files (.m3u) for each CD we have. Some servers don't play the songs in CD order, but they will with a playlist.

# assumes mp3 directory structure of g:/mp3/artist/album/tracks.mp3
# generates playlist of format: g:/m3u/artist-album.m3u

$mp3dir="g:/mp3";
$m3udir="g:/m3u";

opendir(ARTIST, $mp3dir);
@dir = grep !/^\.\.?$/, readdir ARTIST;
foreach $artist (@dir) {
    print "\nartist: $artist\n";
    opendir(ALBUM,"g:/mp3/$artist");
    @album = grep !/^\.\.?$/, readdir ALBUM;

    foreach $album (@album) {
        print " album: $album\n";

        opendir(TRACK,"g:/mp3/$artist/$album");
        @track=grep /\.mp3/,readdir TRACK;
        $playlist="";
        foreach $track (@track) {
            print " track: $track\n";
            $playlist.="g:\\mp3\\$artist\\$album\\$track\n";
        }
        closedir TRACK;

        # create playlist
        $m3u_name="$m3udir/$artist-$album.m3u";
        $m3u_name=~s/\\ /_/g;
        print "   m3u: $m3u_name\n\n";
        PrivoxyWindowOpen(A,">$m3u_name");
        print A $playlist;
        close(A);
    }
    closedir ALBUM;
}