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The Web Interface

Part II: Home Entertainment

You can group the songs any way you like. Grouping by album makes sense to

me, but perhaps you don’t have complete albums in your collection. The scripts

that build the web pages don’t actually care if the songs are truly related by

album, only that the songs are contained in subfolders of the artist’s folder. You

could just as easily create a folder called “all songs” and load it up, or you could

group by genre instead of artist. In fact, as long as your MP3 files are nested two

layers beneath the root of the library, you can create any structure you desire

without modifying the scripts at all.

2. Create a virtual directory to access your media library

Although the scripts for this project have direct access to the filesystem,

web browsers will not be able to retrieve the audio files unless a path to

them is provided. With IIS you can create links to portions of the filesystem

outside the web site itself (or even on a completely different machine) using

virtual directories, and have them appear to be part of the web site.

1. Open the Internet Service Manager for your web server.

2. Right-click on your web site, select New → Virtual Directory, and then

click Next.

3. Enter an alias for the directory; this need not be the same as the actual

directory name. If you’d like to be consistent with the ...