STplayer home page

April 2004

stplayer is a PHP script to permit the easy selection and playing of MP3 files on a Linux web server. Unlike most other MP3 players, stplayer does not require X-windows or X-clients, just a browser. But, since the command-line MP3 player itself, mpg321, resides on the server, the user needs to be within earshot of the server!

This software also has a number of other improvements over similar projects:

All searches are accomplished via the Unix 'find' command.
No databases are required.
New MP3 files are discovered automatically, there's no "re-scan" process.
Random album selection is supported.
It's easy to play an entire album, or just portions of it.
It's just PHP, so it's easy to enhance.
Tests against a 9000 file music library return results almost instantly.

The user interface is oriented towards the playing of soundtrack or classical albums. For these types of music "track shuffling" or displaying all of the "tracks" for a composer make no sense! Typical soundtrack albums have tracks with names like "elevator chase #1" or "volcano explodes". The movements of a classical album are similarly meaningless when taken out of context ("allegro", "andante").

Operation

stplayer has three controls on the initial page. First, you may search for a text string in Albums, Artist names, or Track names. This search is case-insensitive and starts as soon as you press RETURN in the text box, with one of the three radio buttons activated.

Second, clicking "RANDOM" will display twenty album titles, selected at random. Finally, clicking "STOP" will use the Unix "ps" and "kill" commands to halt all running mpg321 processes on the server.

Selecting an album will display additional controls. Clicking "ALL" will cause all the displayed tracks to be marked for playing, "NONE" will deselect all tracks. Clicking "PLAY" will cause mpg321 to be invoked with the checked tracks as it's arguments.

Requirements:

In order to run this script you will need the following:

Linux web server, with PHP enabled.
mpg321, an open source MP3 player, must be installed.
Perl must be present, and the "MP3::Info" module.

Gotchas

I use the "natcasesort" function in PHP, which appears to be something pretty new. Older PHP versions may not have it. You could substitute another sort function without too much loss of functionality.

mpg321 seems to leave a file behind in /tmp. If you run it from the command line as one user, PHP may not be able to write to that file as whatever user Apache runs as. Be sure to delete the file by hand after running mpg321 manually.

Work Arounds

Any other command-line MP3 player can probably be substituted for mpg321. The Perl program (2 lines) and the MP3::Info module are used solely to provide track duration information. These references could just be deleted from the PHP script if need be.

Where to get it

You can download the source for this application from the Sourceforge File List Page for this project.

STplayer home page

Operation

Requirements:

Links