So Lloyd wrote something pointing out this piece by Jon Udell about the Lazlo Soundblox which is a Flash front-end to a server for streaming MP3s.
I’m not completely convinced by Soundblox. You can either run it from the installation hosted on the author’s server (and I don’t know how stable that installation is guaranteed to be) or you can go to the effort of installing a Tomcat application on your web server (and I’m not keen on installing Java application servers on my servers). Also it only seems to serve MP3s and most of the content I’d want to serve is in Ogg Vorbis files.
But anyway, the input file it takes is XML and it sounded like a fun thing to play with for the evening. So I reached for Perl and the Template tookit and whipped up an application that generates an XML file that describes the MP3s in a given directory together with a web page that uses that to display the Soundblox application.
And here is the result. It’s not perfect yet. The XML parser seems a little picky and I can’t get it to recognise artists’ names pulled from the MP3 file. But it proves the concept works. If I want another file to appear on the list, I just drop it into the directory.
If you’re interested, the raw XML is here and the template that does most of the work is here.