mserv 0.41 review

Mserv is a jukebox-style music server designed to play mp3, ogg, etc

License: BSD License File size: 0K Developer: James Ponder

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Mserv is a jukebox-style music server designed to play mp3, ogg, etc. files based on ratings of users who are logged in. Mserv plays the music via your existing programs like mpg123 and ogg123 to either your sound card (Stable release) or streamed to an Icecast 2 server (NEW! Development release). Mserv is Free Software released under this license.

Mserv runs on a variety of UNIX platforms, including GNU/Linux and BSD platforms. Mserv includes features such as searching, filtering, biased random play, queuing, talking, on-line and off-line track editing, and a standardised TCP protocol. This allows for a variety of interfaces including a telnet text interface, a command line program for scripting and a Perl based web client.

Due to the standarised TCP protocol there are many 3rd-party clients available, including desktop (both UNIX and Windows) graphical clients. There's even an emacs plug-in (written by Lars Bj?nnes) in lisp, and an infra-red controller interface (written by David Brownlee)!

The current development efforts are to modularise the output layers of Mserv to support both Soundard and Icecast streaming as the output devices. In comparison to the current stable release, the beta releases now use libltdl to perform platform-independent dynamic object loading, of which just the icecast module has been written so far. Channels are also in the process of being added so that Mserv can support multiple "rooms" and each channel has a sequence of inputs and multiple simultaneous outputs. This will allow users to add different drivers dynamically, including adding streams at different bitrates and/or output to local devices like soundcards.

Other new features currently in the beta release include the removal of the tracks per album limit, fairer queuing, relative volume adjustments for songs, improvements to the streaming of songs so that there can be no delay between tracks at all (great for mixes), and many many bug fixes.

Please give the beta release a go, and let me know what you think or if you have any problems.

What's New in This Release:
Added generic parameter parser for channel output streams
Added "exec" command to config to allow arbitrary command execution on startup
Removed defaults for each module type and instead use "exec" feature to add output streams to default channel
Added module entry points for start/stop of channel
Icecast module can now (optionally) disconnect from server when channel is stopped
Fixed SET YEAR so that it allows years above 1000! (Thanks to Robin Lee Powell)
Fixed last track check in some functions (Thanks again to Robin Lee Powell)
Split command routines in to separate files and clean up help/execution
Implemented CHANNEL OUTPUT ADD and CHANNEL OUTPUT REMOVE
Added 'downmix' icecast option for converting to mono output
Added resampling at different sample rates using libsamplerate if available
Added options for alerting on unheard, unrated and first play of tracks
Added options for clearing the queue for different modes of user