ZoltanPlayer - Music playing daemon Copyright (C) 1991-2001 Angel Ortega <angel@triptico.com> Home Page: http://www.triptico.com/software/zoltan.html
This software is GPL. NO WARRANTY. See file 'COPYING' for details.
ZoltanPlayer is a music playing daemon. It accepts remote commands via its own mini HTTP server and can use seamlessly Audio or Data CDs. Audio CDs are played internally (optionally querying CDDB info servers) and digital songs in audio CDs are played via external players. It's not limited to CDs, as a hard disk directory can also be used.
The optimal equipment for ZoltanPlayer is a CDROM-equipped computer directly connected to an amplifier or stereo. It's not a streaming server, nor a ripper, nor a simple HTTP+HTML interface jukebox (this could be done with a CGI). ZoltanPlayer integrates the controlling of CD insertion / eject with the capability of directly playing CD Audio and spawning external player for MP3 / Ogg Vorbis / whatever song files.
ZoltanPlayer only runs on Linux by now.
ZoltanPlayer depends of no libraries.
To compile ZoltanPlayer, just do
$ make
A binary called 'zoltan' will be generated.
There are some compilation time options to tweak, specially for some (arbitrary) limits. There are currently a limit of 16384 songs and 512 groups per media and 32 maximum external players, controlled by the MAX_SONGS, MAX_GROUPS and MAX_PLAYERS constants, respectively. If you happen to have more than that number of songs, just do
$ make CFLAGS=-DMAX_SONGS=100000
and the same for the others. The default config file is /etc/zoltan.conf; if you don't like it, you can change it by
$ make CFLAGS=-DDEFAULT_CONFIG_FILE=/opt/zoltan/zoltan.conf
or whatever you want (this can be changed in run-time, too).
As root, do
# make install
and the binary will be installed in /usr/local/sbin. If you want it in, say, /usr/sbin, change the prefix using
# make install PREFIX=/usr
you also must create a config file. Save zoltan.conf.sample as /etc/zoltan.conf and modify to suit your needs. Read the info there, specially about file and directory permissions.
Easy; just do
$ /usr/local/sbin/zoltan
and it will move to background automatically. You can specify an alternate config file as the first and only parameter. ZoltanPlayer is quite verbose; you would like to drop its standard and error output to the bit bucket /dev/null. It refuses to run as root, so choose a non-priviledged user.
By default, ZoltanPlayer accepts HTTP queries on port 5432 (unless you changed it in the configuration file). So point a web browser to it and you'll see an interactive (and spartan) web interface, where you can load CDs / unload CDs / play songs / change volume / etc.
Here is a list of commands you can send to ZoltanPlayer:
| mount | Mounts the CD in the drive (closing it if necessary). If it's a CD Audio, it will take info about it and search the local CDDB cache; if no info for this CD is found, it will query a remote CDDB server. If it's a CD-ROM, it will traverse it recursively looking for playable files and the subdirectories containing songs will be treated as groups. Anyway, the list of songs will be stored in its internal database ready for playing. |
| umount | Unmounts the CD, and ejects it. |
| xmount | A combination of the previous two. If CD is mounted, umount it, and vice-versa. |
| hd | Reads a directory from the hard disk (this directory must be defined in the config file to be used). It will be treated the same as a CD-ROM. This command can also be used to re-read the hard disk directory contents if it has been updated since ZoltanPlayer read it. |
| play | Starts playing the first song. |
| stop | Stops playing. |
| pause | Pauses / unpauses the currently playing song. |
| next-song | Moves to the next song and plays it. |
| prev-song | Move to the previous song and plays it. |
| goto-N | Moves to song number N and plays it. |
| next-group | Moves to the first song of the next group and plays it. If no group is defined (as in Audio CDs), it restarts playing from the first song. |
| prev-group | Moves to the first song of the previous group and plays it. If no group is defined (as in Audio CDs), it restarts playing from the first song. |
| song-info | Returns information about the song being played in one line. This command can be used from a shell script to display the info on an LCD, a ticker or something like that. |
| vol-up | Pumps up the volume by 5%. Only operative if the sound card mixer is being used (see sample config file). |
| vol-down | Lowers the volume by 5%. Only operative if the sound card mixer is being used. |
| cd-info | Shows the current list of songs, and information about the current group and song being played, if any. |
| skip-N | disable the song number N (do not play it). |
| rest-N | enable the previously disabled song number N. |
| toggle | toggle the skip selection. |
| toggle-playlist | toggle the skip selection for those songs inside playlists. |
| shuffle | shuffle the playing order of songs. |
| unshuffle | get back to original sorting of songs (CD order for Audio CDs, or alphabetical ordering if song files from CDROMs or hard disk). |
All this commands (or any unrecognized one), except song-info and cd-info, returns an HTML page with clickable links.
You can send this commands (from, say, a dock customizable button application for window managers as WindowMaker of from an X10 remote control application) to a ZoltanPlayer server using lynx. For example, to mount a CD, you can type
$ lynx -dump http://zoltanserver.example.com:5432/mount > /dev/null
and the CD at zoltanserver will be closed, read and get ready for playing.
Knowing the duration of a digital song is a tricky business. An external 'sizer' program could be used to analyze each song, but if you use many formats (.mp3, .ogg, .wav, etc), obtaining such a program for every format can be hard or even impossible. So, ZoltanPlayer doesn't do magic and acts just like you would do, that is, using a chronograph to time how much the song lasts, and saving each song's length to a file. The song lengths are CRC'ed and cached in the file /var/cache/zoltan.dat. ZoltanPlayer needs to write there, so be kind to him (permission access and so). You can also change the song cache path to whatever you want if /var/cache is not an option.
There is NO security model. This means that anyone having network access to the ZoltanPlayer server can do whatever it wants, as opening / closing the CD tray, loudly playing songs, starting / stopping the CD and so. ZoltanPlayer is meant to live in a trusted area, as a firewalled department subnet or a home system. DON'T run ZoltanPlayer if anonymous users have access to it without using some kind of external security system. Filtering connections to ZoltanPlayer using some kind of firewall seems the better approach.