banshee-web

Shameless electioneering: I want the Banshee Web UI to win the Novell Hack Week People’s Choice Award so that I have more time to hack on it. To do that I need votes! So visit the project page and click on the “Vote” box in the upper left.

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.

By now you’re probably all sick and tired of hearing about Novell’s hack week, so this is a great opportunity to tell you about my hack week project.

I got a late start (ie, today) because I was off yesterday, but I’m working on a web interface to Banshee. The need is obvious: my iPod can only hold 8 gigs of music, and I often want to listen to a song somewhere in the other 40 gigs of music stored at home. DAAP is great for local sharing, but if you want sharing across a WAN, you need the web.

This is also my first attempt at learning JavaScript. I’ve touched it a bit here and there — mainly in the Beagle Firefox extension — and still don’t know many “best practices”, but I am enjoying learning as I go. I’ve been using the excellent JQuery library thus far in building the UI. Right now there are a few AJAXy requests in the page. The list of artists is loaded separately from the page. Clicking on one or more artists loads a list of albums. Clicking on one or more albums loads a list of tracks. Right now all the data is in static files of JSON and there isn’t a server component, so it doesn’t matter what you select. Lastly, I plugged in the open source JW MP3 flash player for actually playing the music. This is probably a temporary solution, but it’s nice to be able to play the music on the page without reloading or opening an external application.

Jakub created the fantastic layout and has been helping with the UI — it was a train wreck before. He also helped me set up git so that we can share our work.

You can play around with a “live” setup here. I hope you like my Grammy award-nominated song, because that’s all you get.

Now that the sun has set and the temperature has dropped below 90 I can go home.