Gronk 1.9 review
DownloadGronk is a Web-based MP3 jukebox
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Gronk is a Web-based MP3 jukebox. Gronk project generates heavily-hyperlinked Web pages listing all of your ripped CDs, by extracting information from CDDB data.
These Web pages allow easy selection of songs or albums to play, and when nothing has been explicitly selected, it selects songs randomly. Playback is done via either XMMS or mpg123.
Here are some key features of "Gronk":
Web-based user interface;
Hierarchical display of bands, albums, and tracks, including album cover artwork (if present);
Easy to select a particular track or an entire album for playback;
When you haven't explicitly selected songs for playback, they are chosen randomly from amongst your entire collection;
Easy to tell it ``never play this song again'';
Can use any command-line program for playback;
Can also use XMMS for playback;
If you use XMMS, then you get Icecast broadcasts for free, via the Oddcast DSP plugin;
Navigation hyperlinks on everything;
Automatically cross-references bands with compilation albums on which they appear;
Gets album and song names from FreeDB/CDDB instead of from the MP3 files themselves, bypassing the 30-character limit;
Doesn't use SQL.
Requirements:
Perl 5.
A whole lot of MP3 files, and their corresponding CDDB files.
A web browser that supports HTML circa 1995. (Tables and colors, but no JavaScript, no layers, no plugins.)
A web server (anything that supports Apache-style ``.htaccess'' files and CGI scripts.)
mp3info or mp3info.
XMMS, mpg123, or mpg321 for playback. I found that playback would skip with mpg123 (e.g., while I am ripping CDs) but that XMMS doesn't skip, so that's what I use. Also, with XMMS you get a scrollbar and a playback timer, which the web page doesn't include.
If you are using XMMS, you'll also need Doug MacEachern's Perl XMMS interface (perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::Xmms') which will in turn require the xmms and xmms-devel packages (from xmms.org.)
What's New in This Release:
ID3 tags are written with "id3tag" instead of "mp3info", which means that both ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags will be used now.
make-cddb.pl understands ID3v2, meaning it will do a better job of importing MP3s ripped with iTunes.
mp3ify.sh will convert .m4a to .mp3 with "faad".
Gronk 1.9 search tags