I looked into Erlang for rewriting my jukebox program which is currently in Java. However, I couldn’t find any modules to read tag information which is what my jukebox uses instead of file names.

In your travels, did you run across any such modules?

Sorry, Andrew, I didn’t; I’ve been ignoring the whole issue of file tagging as “too difficult”. We’ve been finding that a stupid simple substring search on the whole file URL is good enough for us - “worse is better” strikes again?

We’re mitigating the unstructured search approach a bit by exploiting the structure found in the URL itself, clustering result URLs together by their directory part and sorting results lexicographically. We end up with a search result list that is often both clustered by album and in track order (if tracks have “01…” etc. prepended to their filenames) within each album.

Nice! In fact very nice!
However, on my old laptop I didn’t have Java installed, which seem to be needed by the json.js code, so I couldn’t try it out. Apart from that, it is the first real Erlang/Ajax app. I’ve seen so far. Good work!!

Doh! That was a remnant from an earlier hacking session - I’d taken json.js from this earlier project. I’m surprised it works at all! I’ll fix that now and update the tarball.

As a pleasant side-effect, removing the Javaisms from json.js seems to have let the code run on Safari and IE6…

Ok, I got past that problem. But I guess I have a to old Firefox version (1.5.0.7). Since it complains about line 168:

color: red ! important;

Perhaps I sould try and install Firefox 2.0 (if I can figure out how that is done in Ubuntu…).

Another, thing: perhaps you should make use of some of the new nice Autoconf macros for Erlang to locate Yaws (they were presented at the EUC today btw :-) As it is now, I have to change the ref. to /opt every time.

Update: I had to fix a small bug in Yaws. When having several servers listening to the same port, then the ’start_mod’ module was not called properly. It is now fixed in Yaws CVS.

Hey, great that you have it running!

The CSS problem is odd - how does it manifest itself? I’m using 1.5.0.7 here and it seems to work okay. Perhaps you have a developer plugin I’ve not tried?

Well, actually; I can’t get it to work :-)
Follow my link and see if it works for you.
It could be my server, I’ll have to check more closely.
Btw: how do I start playing a tune, just by enque it, or ?

Have you looked at jinzora? How is your Jukebox different than Jinzora? It has same functionality as yours and then some. Thanks.

There’s really no comparison. This is a new, small, simple program, weighing in at 1,400 lines of Erlang and Javascript; Jinzora is a mature, large, complex program, with over 100,000 (!) lines of PHP code. Both are open-source, and both have something to do with playing MP3s in some kind of jukebox-like configuration, but that’s about where the similarities end, it seems to me.

@Tobbe: yes, just enqueueing it ought to do the trick. It’s very strange, the installation you have: it seems that some of the features are working, while others aren’t. For instance, typing in a chat message causes the history list to update, but the timer-based history (and playlist) refresh seems to be broken. Weird.

Another cool AJAX jukebox is at http://www.streampad.com

Seems a lot more advanced than this although certainly not as tiny!

Update: Found that I need to start Yaws in the same directory as the code. So now I don’t get any errors in the log at least. Still doesn’t work though.

It could be a good idea to structure the code under src,ebin,priv directories. The execdaemon binary then goes into the priv directory. You can then locate it with code:priv_dir/1.
Example:

# erl -pa `pwd`/erlang_jukebox
1> l(spider).
{module,spider}
2>  code:priv_dir(erlang_jukebox).
"/home/www/site/erlang_jukebox/priv"

Also: Where do I find this ‘hmix’ program that volume.erl wants to use ? (I’m running Gentoo btw and it doesn’t seem to exist among Gentoo’s packages)

Tobbe, thanks for the tip. I’m still getting to grips with the Erlang way of working - anyway, I’ve just found the guide to application directory structure, and I’ll take your advice regarding priv. I’ll post again when I’ve committed the changes to darcs.

Oh - there’s a copy of the hmix source code in the util/ subdirectory.

A friend pointed out Music Playing Daemon to me; it’s the first thing I’ve found that makes it clear that it has similar goals to our jukebox software, ie a single playlist that’s under the control of multiple users.