Have I told you how sweet Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is? It is sweet.
Tonight I toyed with foobar2000, a music player that supports all kinds of audio formats, including the lossless compression format I’m using, the open source flac. Lossless compression means that each song takes up, oh about 1/2 the space, but there are no bits lost. The audio should sound exactly identical to the original recording I rip from. It’s a compromise between ripping the full-sized WAV files and compressing down to MP3.
Anyway, along with foobar2000 I decided to dip my toe in the waters of Last.fm. Last.fm supports many PC audio players, collecting data from your listening habits, creating stations for you to try new music, analyzing the music you listen to, etc. A lot of stuff. Well, of course XBMC has the power to submit to Last.fm as well. Most excellent. Not only that, but I can browse all the information about my Last.fm account, my friends (a list that currently consists of Mini), and my neighbors (whatever that ends up meaning). I can listen to all kinds of customized “stations” through XBMC, sitting on my couch in front of MB Quart speakers. Life is good.
(Currently my Last.fm blog overview is residing beneath the first post on the page. I can not get it elegantly incorporated into the sidebar, so you’ll just have to deal with it. Incidentally, if you want a Now Playing iTunes plug-in license, used to publish what you are playing on your blog, I may be able to help you.)
This XBMC thing is starting to wrap up. There are two PC’s that will be fully networked, eventually storing somewhere on the order of 2.5GBTB of data on 6-8 hard drives. I’ve addressed all the major needs of the system and I can now control it all via my Marantz RC5000i programmable remote control. The Wife can control it pretty well, too. I’m currently working on a couple details I need to address with our home movies and digital photos.
And with that I’ll be on to creating a PC to backup all of our important documents (which basically amounts to our home movies and photos) nightly. One process to rule them all.
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I’m looking forward to seeing this rig when I’m down there for the car care weekend.
I think you’ll like it. It really shows the power of open-source software as it blows away all other off-the-shelf media clients. (Well, that’s from my reading, not actual usage.) If you can think of it, there’s a good chance it’s been done or someone is trying to do it.
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[...] The driver of this whole decision is frustration. I do a lot of computer tweaking at home. I’ve built a NAS (I really need to post something about this). I watch and listen through an Xbox. I have a machine dedicated to ripping discs, downloading content, and serving content on the web. Through all of this I have wrestled countless, unintuitive hours with my Windows machines trying to get hardware and software to work just as I need it to. There has to be a better way! [...]