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Chapter 10, Access Your Entire Media Collection Over the Internet
The Media Player
Any media player that can play files specified as a URL and read WinAMP-
style playlists will be fine for this project. Naturally, WinAMP will work, as
will XMMS and Windows MediaPlayer. I created this project about three
years ago and have been using Windows MediaPlayer to access it all along;
Recently, I started using XMMS with equal success.
The Backing Store
You could get into some very complex stuff with the backing store using
a database management system like MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server
Desktop Engine (MSDE). Doing so would allow you to associate all kinds
of information with your files; for example, you could add information that
would allow you to view songs by genre or decade. However, we’re going
to keep things simple in this project and use a “database” that will be easy
to access and understand—your filesystem. Using your filesystem as your
backing store offers the advantage of simplicity at the expense of imposing
some restrictions on how you view your library.
To start off, you’ll need to have storage that is both large enough to accom-
modate your music collection and that is accessible to your web server.
Chances are that both the web server and the media library are on the same
machine, but they don’t need to be.
If you don’t already have a web server ...