simon@ITD.Adelaide.EDU.AU (Simon Hackett) (12/21/90)
motcid!skrbec@uunet.uu.net (Brad Skrbec) writes: > What I would like to see with this technology is a menu driven > jukebox style setup. Lets say you have a cd changer with 6 disks. > You put in any 6 disks in any order, and get a menu of songs and > play times. You then check off the songs you want to hear in the > order you want to hear them, and then you have the evening's music > programmed and don't have to touch it again. > I hate the current methods of programming changers. If you've got > fairly large contents on each CD, it can take half an hour to program > a full set. > Even better would be a connection to a PC which would allow you do > do anything you wanted with the information. *** warning - trumpet blowing follows, ignore it if you're offended by people who think they've done something neat **** You're going to be amused, I think, to learn that I've built one of these already. Specifically, earlier this year I worked with TGV, Inc to create a technology demonstration for the "Interop 90" event in San Jose, California in October. What we did: - Used a little magic box I had built to connect a Pioneer 6 disk cd changer and a tuner/amp to any TCP/IP network, running IP, UDP and a full SNMP management agent which implements an "Audio-visual" MIB defined by myself, Stuart Vance at TGV, Inc, and the inimitable Marshall Rose. Literally a stereo system you can "ping"! - demonstrated it at Interop with some nice X-windows front end software written by TGV, which accesses a (user maintained) database of each of his disks. It pops up a window listing all your disk names,you click on a disk name and get another window listing all the tracks on that disk, and all the disks+tracks in the same 6 disk cartridge. Then you simply click on track titles to queue those tracks for playing (or on the disk name to queue the whole disk). Each selection can be specified down to starting time, ending time, repeat count, requeue count, and audio playback level. - using another X window tool, you can control the player and amplifier during play, using the obvious "play, pause, stop, fade down, fade up" sort of buttons, plus a moveable volume dial which moves the real (motor driven!) dial in the Pioneer Amp in synch with it, plus run the tuner. - another X window displays continuous status - disk being played, time into the track, time into the disk, radio station selected, etc etc. So: It exists! A PC running IP, plus X-windows and/or some custom software to generate the right SNMP requests would be capable of running it, although a workstation makes life simpler. Via SNMP, you have complete access to the system status and the Table-of-Contents information from all the 6 disks loaded, and the system generates a unique ID for each disk (which gets stored in your database), so that it always plays the right disks, regardless of what order you loaded them into the player. It also copes with queuing selections that span multiple disks, it pops the disk pack out at the right time and generates a message asking for the next pack to be loaded.... It's great fun. So was the other thing we did with it - generated the second of two Internet SNMP-controlled *toasters* on show at Interop (the first one was courtesy of John Romkey) It wasn't originally built as a production item (although I do have a firm order for one already, so it's looking like I _will_ build some more!). If you're interested in further details, you should contact me directly. Simon Hackett simon@itd.adelaide.edu.au