mp3 Jukebox for the office

We are doing some team development on a couple projects going on at work. It is so much more effective to have all of your development team in one location. But I'll save that topic for another day.

What I really want to get to today is the Jukebox we have setup at work. Since we are working at a team we need constant communication so headphones don't really work. On the other hand, there are certainly times when the room is silent. I mean, come on, we are all pretty much introverted computer geeks. To fill some of this quiet time we decided to setup a Jukebox. I was all for this and took the lead on setting it up:

Step 1: Setting up central source
I have an external 80 gig IDE harddrive that I cheaply made by taking the harddrive and buying a $12 external case. The external case takes an internal IDE drive and wraps it in its case so that it can be connected to using a USB connection. So our music source was in place.

Step 2: Deciding on a player
This one was pretty easy. For software, WinAmp is the only way to go to play music in mp3 format. We are using version 2.95. We have an extra Laptop sitting around so it was a good fit to be our Jukebox server.

Step 3: Setting up interaction
This is the step that really took our Jukebox over the edge. Using a very nifty plug-in for WinAmp called Wawi allowed the Jukebox server to be accessible to everyone on our team. It allows everyone access to do pretty much anything possible on a full install of WinAmp. The only unwritten rule we have is that the Random setting stays on. The install and configuration for Wawi was a snap. The plug-in is really a webserver that serves up webpages allowing remote users to interact the locally installed WinAmp player. I assume it takes the web request and turns them into Windows commands that WinAmp accepts.

So as a result team members can now contribute whatever music they want and everyone is happy all day long.

TO DOs:
Right now we have the music cranking through the Laptop speakers. It is acceptable but can be greatly improved by a cheap pair of PC Speakers.