mp3act 1.2 review
DownloadThe mp3act digital music system is designed to be a central location for your digital music collection and a means to easily organize
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The mp3act digital music system is designed to be a central location for your digital music collection and a means to easily organize and listen to your digital media through your stereo, over a local network, or anywhere in the world.
No more shuffling through hundreds of compact discs to find that one song you want to hear. mp3act contains a ton of great features that allow you to listen to your music anywhere at anytime.
Allow friends and family to listen to your music without allowing them to download it. mp3act accomplishes all of this through an incredibly easy to use interface made possible with web standards and AJAX techniques. mp3act is available entirely for free and can be used on any Linux distribution with the Apache web server, PHP4, and MySQL database installed. Installation is simple and the requirements are minimal.
Here are some key features of "mp3act":
Web-based, lightweight, and standards compliant
Since mp3act is web-based, it is accessible over any computer on a network with an mp3act server, or if the server is public to the Internet it is accessible to anyone on the Internet, provided they have a valid account. The interface is very lightweight. It does not rely heavily on images and uses very lean XHTML and CSS. Also, because mp3act makes use of AJAX techniques and DOM scripting, the interface will never entirely reload as portions are only updated as needed. This makes for a experience closer to a desktop application and less like using a website.
It’s Free and Open
mp3act is free to download and use, and it is open source, relying on free open source software. Since mp3act makes use of PHP and MySQL it can be run on a Linux server, which is free, or using Mac OSX which is UNIX based.
Both Remote Streaming and Local Jukebox modes
mp3act has the ability to Stream music to individual computers on a local network or over the Internet from anywhere in the world. For example, every room in your house that contains a computer, or even someone sitting on the porch with a wireless laptop, can all listen to different music at the same time, all from one central host computer. Additionaly, the mp3act server computer can be hooked up to a stereo system, and while in Jukebox mode, any mp3act user can play music over the stereo. The Jukebox mode is public, where everyone can control a stereo; while the Streaming mode is private meaning each user can have a unique music stream. You can switch between these two modes instantly.
User Authentication and Access Levels
mp3act is password protected and contains the ability to set access levels of its registered users. Users can be suspended and allowed to only use certain features of mp3act such as adding new music and downloading music from the server. Also, mp3act employs an IP scheme which prevents the same account to be logged in and listening to streaming music from separate IP addresses. Additionaly, each user can save his/her preferences on the remote server and view past play statistics.
Reads Your MP3 ID3 Tags
When you import music into your mp3act database, it will read the ID3 Tag data for each file for Artist, Album, Song Title, Track Number, Year, etc., and categorize it accordingly. If you maintain solid ID3 tags, your mp3act server will be organized very well.
Downloads Album Cover Art using the Amazon API Service
If you set up an Amazon API account, mp3act is able to download and locally store the Album cover art for every album on your host server. mp3act will do its best to send an Artist and Album to the Amazon database, however sometimes due to misspellings the album art will not be found.
Invite Mode to Prevent Unwanted Access to your server
If you enable invite mode, an Administrative user must send new users an invitation via Email in order to allow the user to sign up for an account. Only one account can be activated for each invitation sent out. This way you can easily moderate who joins your online music community.
Ability to Save and Load Playlists
Each user has the option to save a playlist for future use. You can give the playlist a name and also specify if you want the playlist to be private, so that only you can use it, or public to every user on the server.
Create Many Types of Random Mixes
The Random Mix creator allows you to create different types of mixes. You can play a random mix of everything on the server, a random mix of one or more artists, a random mix of one or more albums from different artists, or play one or more genre randomly.
RSS Feed of Recently Added Albums
Each mp3act server provides an RSS feed that users can subscribe to and keep up to date with the latest albums added to the server.
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