In an office environment, where people's tastes and preferences can vary widely, it can be very difficult to decide what music gets played. Sure, you can designate one person to be the DJ for an hour, or a day, but even an hour can be a trial for certain musical selections, and only the hardiest can weather the benchmark of bad musical taste: twenty consecutive repetitions of Michael Jackson's "Thriller".
What if an mp3 enabled stereo was able to grab playlists from any set of computers and pick randomly from them, one from each source at a time, according to certain parameters? And what if everyone got a certain number of vetoes which could be enacted by pressing a button on a form on the web (or on a GUI client), so that the truly revolting songs, such as Wilson Phillips' chart-topping, gut-churning single, "Release Me", were given the fate they deserve?
Further, songs that everyone likes could be given a vote of confidence, which might increase their likelihood of coming up in the rotation. And people who get more votes of confidence increase their likelihood of a song from their pool being picked in the rotation (so that it's no longer round-robin, but a statistical selection). Algorithms like these, were they in effect years ago, might have saved countless people from the damage that can result from overexposure to such dubiously musical works as Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy", a condition which has cost society millions in health care and lost productivity. Clearly this is a critical need.-- rigel, Apr 18 2001 IceDJ http://www.remixradio.com/icedj/Simple DJ CGI software for IceCast [bishdogg, Apr 18 2001] Tunez http://sourceforge.net/projects/tunez/MP3 Jukebox with voting (haven't tried it out) [bishdogg, Apr 18 2001] DJukebox http://theory.org/s...jukebox/design.htmlDistributed mp3 management/streaming system (linux-only) [bishdogg, Apr 18 2001] Great idea. This is much better than plotting revenge on the co-worker who's put Elton John on repeat play.-- kitsune, Apr 18 2001 Years ago I built cabinets. Two kinds of music were played, Country And Western. I don't build cabinets anymore.-- thumbwax, Apr 19 2001 I'm pretty sure there are lots of "digital DJ" programs that offer a Web site and let people who connect to it submit songs, veto songs, vote, etc.. I can find a link if you really want...-- egnor, Apr 19 2001 Picture this... "MP3 Server in a Box". Network appliance which can be "dropped in" to a corporate LAN (or any 10/100 base-t network). The appliance boots, snags a DHCP-assigned IP and provides the following features: o HTTP-based configuration/management o Centralized management of LAN mp3 SMB shares (tell the appliance locations of mp3 trees, eg. "\\Bobs Pc\mp3", and it'll recursively traverse them indexing and adding all MP3s to its database) o Provision for SMB-based access to any indexed MP3 (with searching perhaps; maybe in ID3 tag data)... I.e. appliance acts as an aggregator/locator for disparate mp3 shares on the LAN o An "always-on" Shoutcast (or ice-cast) stream (this is where the voting, round-robin or statistical selection algorithms, and such come into play).
Using SMB provides a decent solution for heterogenous networks (with Samba for Unices, for instance). Configuration and management should be simple and kept to a minimum. The most common use-case should be little more than plugging in a power cable and an ethernet cable.-- bishdogg, Apr 19 2001 [admin: use <br> at the end of the line to force a line break.]-- jutta, Apr 19 2001 Baked at my place of employment. A co-worker wrote an MP3 broadcaster which did this. Audio was sent to clients using multicast, with careful time synchronization so that listeners in adjacent cubicles wouldn't get annoying echo effects. Each listener had an application which would display the next few songs in the playlist. They could add songs or delete them (we had ideas for ways to keep people from abusing this ability, but people didn't abuse it, so we never got around to implementing them.) If the playlist got too short an automatic DJ would add songs to the end of it. The cool part is that each listener could assign a preference to each song, and the auto-DJ would add songs based on the preferences *of the people currently listening*. It worked fairly well when we weren't having network problems...-- wiml, Apr 19 2001 There is an ethernet radio service that existed in the 80s for a Sun workstation as we used to listen to it in a converted warehouse. It played off a music CD placed in a drive.-- Aristotle, Apr 19 2001 Yeah. But i don't like s club 7-- sid, Apr 21 2001 No, UnaBubba, it's not just you.-- absterge, Apr 23 2001 Nice. That way we wouldnt have to listen to Christmas carolls from October till january because thats what the prick wh sits next to the music set wants. + I'll give you another bun if you figure out how to reprogram his cellphone ring.-- energy guy, Mar 20 2005 what if it were modified to randomly delete music from each computer's playlist until all of it was gone?
It could then be marketed as a corporate watchdog, to ensure workers are actually working instead of zoning out to their favorite tunes.
damn, I'm new here, I just noticed this is similar to: The MP3 Destroyer....-- thirdcherry, Mar 25 2005 random, halfbakery