Building a JukeBox

[StevenRFrancis]

Well, Im a college student with a laptop that I use for my downloaded music, but the speakers and HD space stink. I was thikning that I could use one of those shuttle mini PC's as a jukebox if I networked it. What I want to be able to do is download music from my laptop and send it there for storage. Then I want to be able to control it like a stereo and play what ever I want by accesing through my laptop. Here are the specs I cam up with. Is this even possible? Searching archives revealed nothing. Oh and if this is possible, are these specs enough?

Shuttle SV24 with VIA 800 MHz 165
CD Rom 52x 25
128 MB ram 32
Turtle Beach Sound Card 62
Logitech Z-560 136

1 or 2 Hard Drives 80 or 120 Gig's ~100 each
If 2 prob on mirror raid

 

[Occifer]

The Snowcrash plugin for Winamp works well for controlling Winamp from any computer on the network. I would think that system would play music quite nicely. 🙂

 

[DrVos]

you just want more storage space right? If you are a starving college student like me, you might want to consider getting a firewire card and enclosure and popping a 120GB HD in the enclosure. Good firewire enclosures run around 75, a firewire card for 30, and whatever you want on your HD.

Cool thing about the firewire enclosure option is that your tunes will transfer far faster than ethernet and the enclosure is much more portable. An added bonus is that you can daisy chain hd's or other drives to expand in the future.

 

[Texun]

Welcome to the forum, Steven;

It should work fine. That VIA chip would be slow for any serious work but should do well as a jukebox. I built a Celeron 500 with 256SDR, SB Live 5.1 and an 80g drive for $230 (W/O speakers). The cpu and Aopen board came from an Ebay Seller that seems to sell closeout and used items. The mATX board was NIB and the cpu used but they work perfectly. Not intentionally trying to plug his link, but if you are looking for an enexpensivve solution you may find more ideas there. Overall I have a decent stereo that can play for days. I use Remote Administrator to control the jukebox and it hasn't had one hiccup. I don't even use my 200W home system now. An MP3 Jukebox is the way to go!

You are shooting for a ton of storage there if you go for two drives so you must be a madman, 🙂 I have over 3,000 MP3's, most at or above 128 bit and have only used 13g. I also have it partitioned by OS, MP3's, Software Apps, Games and patches.

Have fun!

 

[tboneuls]

i use snowcrash to stream mp3s on another computer on the network, and im even using phoneline networking (10mbps) and it works great playing 320kbps mp3s. snowcrash allows you to skip the monitor for the machine and its very simple to use. i had to tweak the buffering in winamp so i would buffer as much as possible and i believe i ran it as a critical process