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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 ...