When you have a home server, sooner or later your coworkers and friends (and if all is well even both in one person ;-) ) will want to have access to your library
Cablecom, my ISP, has this nice 6000/600 service, so there’s plenty of upstream for others to use in principle. And you know: Here in Switzerland, the private copy among friends is still legal.
Well, last sunday it was time again. Richard wanted access to my large collection of audiobooks and if you know me (and you do as a reader of this blog), you’ll know that I can’t just give him those files on a DVD-R or something. No. A webbased mp3-library had to be found.
Last few times, I used Apache::MP3, but that grew kinda old on me. You know: It’s a perl module and my home server does not have mod_perl installed. And I’m running Apache 2 for which Apache::MP3 is not ported yet AFAIK. And finally, I’m far more comfortable with PHP, so I wanted something written in that language so I could make a patch or two on my own.
I found mp[3]act which is written in PHP and provides a very, very nice AJAX based interface. Granted. It breaks the back-button, but everything else is very well done
And it’s fast. Very fast.
Richard liked it and Christoph is currently trying to install it on his windows server, not as successful as he wants to be. mp3act is quite Unix-Only currently.
The project is in an early state of developement and certainly has a rough end here and there, but in the end, it’s very well done, serves its need and is even easily modifiable (for me). Nice.
gnegg 