Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

224

Part II: Home Entertainment

Wrapping Up

That’s all there is to it! You might find that expanding your collection is eas-

ier if the tool you use to rip your CD collection can read data from CDDB,

an online database with album and track data for just about every CD in the

world. You can then automatically save the files into folders in compliance

with the system you’ve defined for your library.

If you have a PC integrated with your home audio system, you might find

yourself using this application in place of your CD collection. I find this to

be especially nice when I have parties and don’t want to play DJ. My guests

can have fun without mixing up all my CDs in their drunken stupor.

If you’ve never played with dynamic page creation tools like ASP, I hope

this simple project has given you a sense of how powerful they can be. I

also encourage you to add your own personal flair to the look and feel of

the pages.

Extensions

For the sake of being concise, this project provides only essential function-

ality, but some very simple additions can make your new system a pleasure

to use.

• You could add cover art to each album and modify the display func-

tions to insert the images in the page. You could even get fancy and use

screen-scraping techniques to automatically grab cover art from a web

site like Amazon.com or Buy.com.

• One limitation of this project is that you can’t mix and match songs

from several artists or a specific subset of songs from one artist. For

example, you can’t create a playlist of your three favorite songs from

three different artists. This can be corrected in various ways. Perhaps

you could modify the single song function so that it appends to the

playlist rather than creating a new one each time. Or maybe you could

keep track of the songs you’re selecting using session variables.

• Wouldn’t it also be nice to be able to upload MP3s from anywhere on

the Web to your collection? You could add a form that allows you to

browse your local filesystem and transfer selected files to the correct

location on your web server.

• MP3 files generally contain a lot of meta-information in ID3 tags. You

could add functionality to parse that data and include it in the display

routines to provide richer information about the music you collect. You

could even create tools that allow you to modify or insert tags.

Wrapping Up

hhpg.indb 224

11/24/2004 1:56:12 PM