headless server: play audio from laptop?

[xSauronx]

i have a centos 5.1 headless samba server/torrent box

id like to plug some speakers in to it and be able to play music through it whenever i like, instead of keeping the speakers plugged into my laptop.

i had done this before when i had debian on it (i switched to cent just for the hell of it, i guess) but used vnc/xfce

i didnt know if that would be the best way to do what i want, or if theres something else to try that might show me something new

any ideas? im really not sure where to start, so even just a point in the right direction would be good

/dont say the centos forums, they suck.

 

[Brazen]

I'm not sure I understand. You have music files on the server, and you want to play them through speakers connected to the server, right? Is your issue with playing music from the command line, then? Or are you wanting to know how to set up vnc into the CentOS box?

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: Brazen
I'm not sure I understand. You have music files on the server, and you want to play them through speakers connected to the server, right? Is your issue with playing music from the command line, then? Or are you wanting to know how to set up vnc into the CentOS box?

vnc i can set up

yeah, i guess i want to play them over the command line, but it sounds like a pain huh?

or be able to load or tunnel something over the network that will play stuff from the server...

 

[Nothinman]

Well you could setup a sound server on there, things like arts, esd, etc have the ability to push the sound to another box. xmms2 and mpd are also client/server based so you could put the server on there and run a client on your machine.

 

[Crusty]

Xmms is fairly easy to control via the command line. Otherwise there are some plugins that give you network control with a gui or web interface I believe.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: xSauronx

Originally posted by: Brazen
I'm not sure I understand. You have music files on the server, and you want to play them through speakers connected to the server, right? Is your issue with playing music from the command line, then? Or are you wanting to know how to set up vnc into the CentOS box?

vnc i can set up

yeah, i guess i want to play them over the command line, but it sounds like a pain huh?

or be able to load or tunnel something over the network that will play stuff from the server...

easiest thing I can think of would be mplayer. IIRC, to play a media file from the command line, the syntax is just "mplayer filename.ogg" (you use an open media format, right ). It will work with any media type supported by mplayer, which is just about everything. It will even play video files from the command line and render them in ascii-art, which is just freaking amazing.

By "tunnel something over the network" do you mean to play media files stored on the server, but over the laptop speakers? That would be easy enough to just make a file share with samba or nfs from the server and play the files with your laptop's media program.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: xSauronx

Originally posted by: Brazen
I'm not sure I understand. You have music files on the server, and you want to play them through speakers connected to the server, right? Is your issue with playing music from the command line, then? Or are you wanting to know how to set up vnc into the CentOS box?

vnc i can set up

yeah, i guess i want to play them over the command line, but it sounds like a pain huh?

or be able to load or tunnel something over the network that will play stuff from the server...

easiest thing I can think of would be mplayer. IIRC, to play a media file from the command line, the syntax is just "mplayer filename.ogg" (you use an open media format, right ). It will work with any media type supported by mplayer, which is just about everything. It will even play video files from the command line and render them in ascii-art, which is just freaking amazing.

By "tunnel something over the network" do you mean to play media files stored on the server, but over the laptop speakers? That would be easy enough to just make a file share with samba or nfs from the server and play the files with your laptop's media program.

no, i can do the latter already...like i said, its a samba server as it is. i didnt know if id be tunneling and X program to my laptop, but youve all presented enough options that im pretty sure i can get what i want, once i have a chance to look at everything available and see what I like most i knew there were options, i just had no *idea* what they were

thanks all

 

[raz0rskyl1n3]

Sounds like a good solution for you would be mpd. I had a set up like your talking bout for a while. I simply used mpd, ssh into the box and used ncmpc You can also have client side apps to access but not play through the boxes speakers. So mpd+ncmpc+ssh would probably work for you.

 

[aidanjm]

why not just tunnel X over ssh and run a program like amarok (or gnome equivalent)? you don't really need a vnc connection, as you don't want to be running an x-server/ gui desktop on the server itself.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: aidanjm
why not just tunnel X over ssh and run a program like amarok (or gnome equivalent)? you don't really need a vnc connection, as you don't want to be running an x-server/ gui desktop on the server itself.

well that was one of the things i had thought about doing, i might try that with a couple other things just for the hell of it, since thats something i havent ever done anyway.

ill look around and figure something out over the next few days or so

 

[Brazen]

browsing over the Ubuntu forums, I just noticed a guy talking about something called "slimserver" which he uses for an "audio server". Whatever he means by that (the issue was about something else), it may be something worth checking out.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

I would just ssh into the box and run vlc (or maybe a command-line music player) on any file or playlist. Assuming this is an internal network, I would just map out any samba directories and set static internal IPs beforehand to make everything easier.

 

[drag]

Just use MPD.

Music Player Daemon. It's job is to just play music. I was it mentioned above, but seriously. This is what you want.

Don't bother installing a GUI or VNC or anything like that, waste of resources. Learn how to edit the file and just run it. Use putty.exe from Windows if you have to. Then install a client on your favorite desktop and control mpd using that interface. Think of it as background vs foreground. The GUI app you install on your computer to control it is the frontend, mpd is the backend.
http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients

http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients

browsing over the Ubuntu forums, I just noticed a guy talking about something called "slimserver" which he uses for an "audio server". Whatever he means by that (the issue was about something else), it may be something worth checking out.

Ya. It's very cool also. It's a open source program designed to stream mp3 or whatever to a Squeezebox media player or other such thing. Setup a command line media player to listen for streams or something like that and stream your favorite songs to it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlimServer