Installation

of Be in your Stereo.

Install SoundPlay

Download SoundPlay. I recommend you expand it into /boot/apps. Once expanded, run the SoundPlay installer.

Install the SoundPlay plugin

The installation script provided with this package will:
  1. Build the necessary mp3 indexes (see below).
  2. Install the SoundPlay plugin to the "Plugins" folder for SoundPlay.
If the installer reports failure -- having several versions of SoundPlay will certainly confuse it -- then you have to do it yourself. Find the SoundPlay directory in Tracker, and drop the Be In Your Stereo program into the Plugins directory.

Build an mp3 database

Be in your Stereo draws on four BeOS file system attributes to offer you files to add to your playlist: Year, Genre, Artist and Album. These attributes come installed with BeOS R5, and are automatically installed by a number of systems such as RipEnc and id3attr. The installer script provided in this package will also build the indices.

Warning! These attributes must be indexed in order to quickly produce any search results based on them. Nothing will show up when you try to find tracks if these indexes are not built.

Once you have created indexes for these attributes, you need to put information into those indexes. Though you might think otherwise, BeOS doesn't automatically index information that existed before the index was created - only new information is put in the index. The standard way to do this is to duplicate your audio file folder in Tracker, then trash the original.

If you don't already have information in your audio files' year, genre, artist, and album attributes, there are many tools to help you build some. mp3 files support a small amount of extended information called id3. Many encoders will automatically populate the id3 information from places like CDDB or FreeDB.

An obvious thing to do is pull id3 information out and store it in BeOS attributes, and tools like id3attr do just that. The BeOS tip server has a useful article to give you further ideas. Once the id3 tags have been extracted, you can use something like MP3 Tags and Attributes or MP3 Army Knife to graphically set and re-write information with a Tracker add-on.

Note that you don't have to use any of the id3 standard's canned genres. Make up your own.

Also note that you don't have to have every attribute of every file set. However, at least one of the attributes (year, genre, artist, album) must be set in order for the plugin to find it.

Making it run forever

This section is skippable for now; come back when you need to set up your Be machine as part of your stereo.

Once you've got your attributes set up:

  1. Place a line like the following in /boot/home/config/boot/UserStartup:
    launch /boot/apps/SoundPlay/SoundPlay.
  2. Configure SoundPlay's startup settings in a way that seems reasonable.
  3. Configure the Be in your Stereo's settings in a way that seems reasonable. Quit SoundPlay to save your settings.
  4. Test your machine out by rebooting it, and pointing a web browser at its port 8080 once it starts.
  5. Disconnect everything except your network connection, and place it next to your stereo.
  6. Enjoy the sounds!
There is the important question of how you add files to your collection. This facility is not supported at all by the plugin, so you need to resort to some other tools for now. Some thoughts:
next: usage