A quick roundup on the Banshee Media Server:
- Nat pointed me to SoundManager 2, a Javascript- and Flash-based framework for playing sound. The actual playback is done using Flash, but the whole thing can be controlled and monitored from Javascript. This is exactly what I wanted for audio playback, and I replaced JW MP3 with it. Thanks to this, I implemented basic controls (pause, stop, next and prev) and now the playback proceeds through the playlist.
- I added table sorting, using the TableSorter plugin for JQuery. The audio even proceeds through the sorted list, so if you change the sort of the table while something is playing things don’t jump around.
- Jakub had a good point that you might want to use a very similar UI for controlling playback on the server, essentially making this interface a remote control. Imagine using a Nokia n800 in your kitchen while you are making dinner to control the music playing there. While that probably won’t be a focus for the first version, it should be pretty trivial to do this with the same UI.
- Longtime Beagle contributor Lukas Lipka has started hacking on the server side of things. He has a stripped down XSP starting up. The Banshee D-Bus API isn’t quite ready yet, but hopefully we’ll have a static library on the server that dynamically generates the JSON data.
- I hacked up Aaron’s random library generator to create some huge JSON files and served them. Surprise! We don’t scale to a one million song library at all. The evil part of me wants to use Google Gears to handle processing of the data in a separate thread, but probably we’ll just have to deal with paging through huge numbers of results.
As before, I have an oft-updated server running. Hopefully by the end of the week we will have it serving some live data.