I have all my fid's backed up onto my PC's hard drive so I can sync my players and maintain a current backup if I need one. Problem is I also have all of my original rips stored on the same PC in easy to use folders. I use the folders to play my music in Winamp or whatever. The reduntant copy of the music is wasting space. Has anyone created a music player for a Windows PC that I can use to play my fid's? I'm looking for something that makes it easy to browse available content. Something similar to CharcoalGray's Web Interface would work great. maybe it could be tweaked to look for content on my PC and not my Empeg?

I haven't had a chance to play around with it much, but with Jemplode 54, the RioRID.jar, and the other tools, I think it might be possible to back up your playlist structure in a way to be able to recreate it from regular (non-FIDified) mp3s on your PC. I don't know for sure how you'd do it, or if it is even possible, but I'm posting here in the hopes that it will stimulate some sort of discussion about whether it's possible.

I know that using a RID, the song can be uniquely identified. What I don't know is if any part of the chain maps a RID to a FID so that the playlist can be recreated once the same RIDs correspond to different FIDs.

Anyone?

Oh, also, since the actual mp3 content of the file is the same when it's a FID on your pc, any player should be able to play it if it doesn't get hung up on lack of a .mp3 extension. AFAIK whatever tags it originally had should still be in there too. I think what you might be looking for is a player that has a database component to map your unintelligible file names to real information for the browsing part. Something like foobar2000, or Winamp 5 with the library part installed would do the trick for that.

It'd be some manual work to set up, but it would be tons easier if the files were still all tagged right. After that, you'd browse the library, which would keep track of the fact that "I Will Always Love You" is the file called "1AF30". You'd just want to make sure that it doesn't write anything to the file, because I think the empeg would throw an error if the size doesn't match what it's got in it's database (or maybe that's only for playlists?)

You could always use a symlink farm (or even a hardlink farm) to give you a view with friendly names (using tagmp3 or some other renamer on the links). Although I think the OP was on Windows, and Windows makes it hard to use symlinks (so I've heard: I don't know exactly what problems they cause, just that they are poorly supported).

Yeah you're right, I'm really just looking for something to make browsing through the FID's more like I'm looking at the playlists in the player. Windows Media Player will already play the FID's as they are on my PC, but only one at a time and it's purely random as to what you might be about to play when you click an FID.

Here's a question, why can't I just use charcoalgray's webinterface stuff right on my PC? If I can point to the empeg I should be able to point it anywhere, right? I just need to know where to put it on the PC and how to get IE to recognize my PC's IP address as a server. Tony do you know the answer to this?

Because charcoalgray99's stuff is just enhancing the capabilities of Hijack, which contains an "application layer" which knows all about FIDs and how to interact with the carplayer database.

--Nathan

Here's a question, why can't I just use charcoalgray's webinterface stuff right on my PC?

Because Charcoalgray's web interface depends on the Hijack web server code to feed it the playlist data, it doesn't compile that itself.

How Hijack gets that data, I'm not sure. I don't think it tries to index the FIDs in real time, although I suppose that's possible since instantaneous response isn't necessary for the web interface. And I can't imagine that it loads its own copy of the player's database into memory, so maybe it peeks at the existing player database in memory? I dunno. Mark, how does it do this nifty trick?

In any case, if you wanted to write your own on-the-PC interface for playing raw FIDs, it's pretty do-able, you just have to be able to parse and index the FIDs yourself. Or, figure out the player's database format and copy the database onto your PC in addition to the FIDs and use it as your source.

Hijack merely starts with playlist 100, and reads the FIDs from that file. And then follows the tree as required. Each playlist FID file is just a list of more FIDs.

Cheers

Ah, thanks. That makes sense. Because it doesn't need to access everything at the same time, it only needs to access one tree level at a time, it can do it "live" without keeping everything in memory at once. Gotcha.

try playing with winamps media library
i havent tried it in the application that you wish to use it for, but i believe that it scans all the files and grabs the id3 tag from them. then it creates a database using that information, which (i think) would be exactly what youre wanting

Mark, I have a dumb question..

Is there any way to export a hijack like web interface w/o including the "stream/insert/download" links? I wanted to have a html page that mimic'd my collection on the empeg. I exported the database to csv, then imported into excel and exported to html, but the file was 10mb and was in no particular order. While I'm doing my WOTR shows, I'd like to be able to point someone to an address that would let them browse but not control the player..

I'm guessing the answer is "no".

Anyway, I always wondered how HiJack generated those... very cool solution.

[hijack]
khttpd_commands=0

Cheers

Mind you, that locks everybody out.

Which is the only secure way to do it.

For what you want, you *could* use XML to present a web interface without buttons as the default stylesheet, and then have a separate set of XML with an unpublished URL that *you* use for the broadcasts.

Security by Obscurity..

Cheers

If you're not big on XML, then just grab something like Charcoalgrey99's web interface (XML), and hack out the stuff you don't want accessible. Then clone it all (the originals) into another "secret" directory for your own use, with all the functions left in place in that copy.

-ml

Could I put only a "stripped down" CharcoalGrey interface on my player for people to browse.. then use the HiJack interface to stream for my needs? Or is this a bad idea because someone could just hack my url to get to the HiJack interface?

Does anyone know what happened to CharcoalGrey?

I do precisely this, but it involves exporting the player's database in csv format from Emplode, importing it to MySQL on my workstation, and using a series of PHP scripts I wrote to present an interface and serve files based based on the MySQL table, via the web server also installed on my PC.

I'd be happy to share my PHP scripts, but this is probably a lot more complicated than what you're looking for, and you probably don't have a web server installed on your PC along with PHP/MySQL.

I was thinking about recoding my scripts to read from the FIDS directly for playlist info, instead of using MySQL and getting rid of that layer..but I think I got distracted before I could figure out how to make that work. At the moment, I'm tempted to write my next version to be driven off of an XML export, but I'm waiting for PHP5 to be finalized. It should have better XML support, and hopefully someone will write some good documentation/tutorials on how to go about using it.

None of this probably helps you, but I'm limited to the programming languages I know, which is limited (thus far) to web programming languages. I suppose writing a version of this as a tradtional app would be a good learning experience.

Thanks for the post, it does sound a bit complicated for what I'm trying to do and for my current ability , but it is promising anyway that it has been done sucessfully. Turns out that one of the guys that works here in our warehouse is a bit of a Linux go-getter. He has vowed that he would take a shot at making something up that would fit my needs and maybe other users too. I'll keep everyone posted on how it turns out and if it's good enough to share with the board.