BrowseAMP -- Remotely Control Your WinAmp Music Streams

I’ve posted before about a tool to remotely control WinAmp (in my case I’m usually at my laptop, WinAmp runs on my main rig…you know, the one with decent speakers)…that tool quickly outserved its usefulness as it was LAN only.  I even emailed the guy who wrote it begging for the source code so I could add some more functionality to it to extend it outside a LAN scenario…of course, I never heard anything back.  Then just a couple of days ago while discussing my new music streams with my buddy Ray, he comes to the rescue with this killer add-in for WinAmp:  Enter BrowseAMP.  It’s basically WawiTray on some serious steriods and gives you complete control over your WinAmp player from any web browser (and yes, it looks/behaves great in Firefox).

A quick feature list (not exhaustive by any means):

• Full player control, including volume, track position/previous/next/pause, equalizer, shuffle/repeat.
• The ability to build playlists on the fly (in my case I just select a folder to add all the tracks in that folder to the current playlist, and hit shuffle), or you can put it in complete random mode and it picks and chooses on its own whim (which actually has been great as I’ve discovered tons of tracks I have that I’ve forgotten about).
• Role based security.  For my setup, I have a super-user who can do anything (including uploading tracks from remote machines via the internet on the fly), and a basic user who can view the tracklist (more on that in a second)/browse my collection…and that’s about it.
• The ability to add IP’s/subnets to a whitelist for accessing the playlist.
• IIS isn’t required, it has its own built-in web server.

For me it’s great as I can control my streams from pretty much anywhere (there’s even a WAP version included, so I could log in from my phone if I wanted to).  But there’s another usefulness for it that I can think of (and I really wish I had had this in the past)…no more shuffling tracks from home to work on your [insert MP3 player here].  BrowseAMP combined with ShoutCast means anyone can have their entire music collection anywhere you want.  You could throttle ShoutCast to only allow 1–2 connections, figure out the IP/subnet of your proxy server at work (it has IP/Subnet whitelist capabilities as well), add said IP/subnet to BrowseAMP so no one else can snoop around your playlists, and voila…your very own portable internet based jukebox with all of your collection at your fingertips without the hassle of toting around your MP3 player.  Pretty simple actually, and if you stream with AAC you can keep the bandwidth to a minimum.

The point is that with this new tool in my streaming arsenal I am just about ready to launch v1.0 of Surreal Streams as it fills a huge hole in my streaming needs (I almost had resigned myself to having to roll my own solution).  The only thing left on my todo list is expose all the track information as a web service (Xml of course) so I can wrap a stream-centric site around it, or at the very least a plug-in for Community Server that exposes more information than just a “click me” link.  Initially I’ll just do a now playing banner (with some tracklist history), but I have so many ideas as to what I can do with this down the line.  At the very least, I have a new hobby project to work on…and we all need a couple of those; keeps us fresh as we don’t always get to do the cool stuff at work.

To have a look at the BrowseAMP interface, point your browser to http://jaysonknight.com:8002/ and login with browseamp/browseamp (that account has readonly capabilities, and anyone who attempts to hack will be severely punished).  Feel free to browse around my collection (safe for work, music ONLY ;-)), and if you see anything you’d like to add to your collection feel free to let me know and I’ll tinyurl it to you.  Eventually I’ll try and get that automated as well if there’s a demand.  This whole internet thing just might catch on one day…I love it!