At the same time, we are constantly on the lookout for solutions to enjoy our music collection (and movies collection) across devices, wherever we are.

A lot of recent events indicate that we are not alone in this quest and that it will only get better and better in time.

Recently, of course, Apple introduced the Remote App for iPhone/iPad, AirPlay followed by iTunes Match… In the Unix World, a lot of things already exist as well : Pulse to stream audio across devices and projects like Music Player Daemon (which is nothing but new). Media Center are also making the news frequently (Windows Media Center, Boxee, Plex) and commercial solutions (Music streamingm VoD) like Spotify, Netflix and Hulu are slowly forcing DVD and Blu-Ray Discs pricing down.

Dematerialized solutions are the way of the future but several problem remain :

• how to organize one’s library (how to merge dematerialized bought content and ripped content from CDs and in our case even vinyls that we already had)
• how to make this content accessible across devices (especially in a multi-platform environment)
• how to stream this content on various speakers in the same house
• how to remotely control what we play in each room
• finally, can we somehow enjoy our content even on the move
• (I don’t even mention syncing across devices, the size of our collection makes that totally impossible, the content has to stay in one place)
• (other issues include the ever needed backup management)

We are currently waiting to test some of these solutions (we do not have an AirPlay receiver for example though that will soon arrive).

For now, I’ll focus on one part of our solution : Music Player Daemon.

Music Player Daemon (definition) is a server side music player. It allows to queue and play music files (in various formats) accessible to it via the file system. MPD can be controlled remotely using a wide range of clients (desktop, mobile or web based).

An example ? We have several computers in the house. One of them is the “Media Center”. It has the Music Hard Drive hooked to it and is (mostly) always on. Because it is the “Media Center” it is the computer that has the good sound system attached (whether that means a 5.1 speaker set or a connection to a Home Amplifier System, whatever). Basically, this is the computer that should play music. Why would you listen to a song using your laptop speakers when you can play the same song on your great expensive speaker set ?

So what you do, if you are in your house and connected to your home network, is remotely control what song your “Media Center” computer should play. Using a MPD client, you can browse your Music Library (and your playlists) and just play any of them on your great sound system. The good news is that you can do this using Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and even AppleTV.

Of course, this only answers some of the problems mentioned above (there will more than likely be several more articles on related subjects in this blog in the future). MPD does not offer a solution to the online streaming (at least not directly) not does it solve the problem of playing music acrosse the house on various speaker sets (it only plays on the machine it is installed on). But that’s already a first step to our goal : an ubiquitous access to our Music and Movies Collections.

Some Technical Notes

Setting up the server

Debian

Mac OS X

Configure mpd by editing /etc/mpd.conf or /opt/local/etc/mpd.conf and set the path to your logs, music library, etc.

Start the server (either manually with mpd) or automatically with an /etc/init.d type script

More information

The MPD Community Wiki (new to me) reveals that the project has been pretty active lately which is excellent news.

• MPD Install procedures
• MPD on OS X
• Configuring MPD
• Installing and using MPD on AppleTV

MPD Clients

Now that I’ve described how to setup your MPD server, you will need a client to play your music from anywhere. I switched to Mac OS X about a year ago and this is now my primary system. We also run some Windows machine. I use Debian as well but most of the time, that’s only as a server (ie no graphical interface there)

Windows:

QMPDClient: our favorite client on Windows is QMPDClient. The client suit us best because it didn’t choke on the size of our collection and it handles both file system and tag views.

QMPDClient has been extended with another project QMPDClient-ne which should also run on Windows though I haven’t tested it on this platform.

Linux:

MPD being a project that came from the Linux world, most clients are aiming for this platform.

Currently, I have tested:

QMPDclient (so that Derrick and I can run the same software on both systems)
QMPDClient also has a package available via apt/aptitude for Debian.

QMPDclient-ne in order to see what enhancements have been added like the possibility to pull up lyrics.

QtMPC, another Qt4 based client.

Mac OS X:

Theremin is the most famous Mac OS MPD client as it is written in Cocoa and therefore has the Mac aqua style. Another plus, it has a growl connector.

About a year ago, I had tested Kea2 which was in an alpha stage. It seems to have disappeared.

iPhone / iPad

I’ve tested MPoD for iPhone and will probably try MPaD for iPad soon.

Where to go from there ?

There is a lot more to do on this Music system of ours. We are still looking for a great Music Client (iTunes doesn’t cut it for us at all, our collection is too big for the sorting and management offered) but we want to enjoy solutions like AirPlay. We also hope to see more AirPlay (or similar) received come out in order, one day, to have speakers in every room and a way to play music where we want. Stay tuned…

Here are the installation steps :

Download and run the sshwindows installer.

As the setup will tell you, some simple commands will be needed to complete the installation. Launch the windows command line tool (windows key -> type cmd -> press enter) and head to the directory in which you installed open ssh.

The steps needed to complete the installation are detailed in the docs folder in two files : quickstart.txt will quickly sum up the steps while the readme.txt is a more detailed setup and troubleshooting guide.

Below is a step by step process on what I had to do to get the server running :

According to the quickstart guide, everything should work at this point but that was not the case for me.
I had permission errors with the rsa and das key files

Below is the message I saw :

I solved that problem by using chown and chmod available in the bin folder to change the persmission on these files. As I found out trying to run chown, I needed a cygintl-2.dll file which I didn’t have on that computer. I ended up copying it from another computer running an up to date install of cygwin. In this up to date version, cygintl-2 was called cygintl-8, I renamed it. If you need to, download cygintl-2.dll and cygwin1.dll and place them in your OpenSSH\bin directory. Note that you will need to replace the existing cygwin1.dll.

That’s it, at this point, the server starts. You can kill it (CTRL+C) and start it as a Windows service by running

Time to test our SSH server with a client. On a different computer, run a SSH client (if the other computer is running Windows, you can use putty).

At this point, it worked for me ! Now I can connect to a Windows 7 using SSH and that makes Windows a lot cooler ! Thanks to the developer, Michael Johnson.

Going further, the public key authentication

Since my goal, with all this, was to script the use of VLC from a Unix machine on the Windows one, I could use the public key authentication to bypass the interactive authentication.

The SSH public key authentication system is based on the private and public keys which are expected in the user’s home folder (in a folder called .ssh). So the first step will be to define the user’s home folder on windows.

Since I’m not using cygwin but open ssh for windows, it’s only the declaration of the home folder in openssh that I care for. I edited the file in c:\Program Files (x86)\OpenSSH\etc\passwd and changed the value before last (each value is separated by a . I changed the home folder for my user to /cygdrive/c/Users/<username>. Now I can go in my c:\Users\<username> folder and create a folder called .ssh. I recommend creating this folder using the command window as I don’t think it is possible with the graphical interface.

At this point, you need a public key which you should generate with the command

Now, the idea is to place my user’s public key in this folder in a file called authorized_keys. Since I’ve already setup my public key, I simply add to place it in that folder and do :

Edit your ssh server configuration file and make sure the Public Key authorization is not commented (it was okay for me by default)

From your client computer, connect again using ssh <username>@<windows_ip> and you shouldn’t be prompted for a password anymore.

Now, I can simply launch commands on the windows machine by doing

Finally, moving on with my project which I’ll describe in this blog upon completion. ’till then, hope this tip helps

I had to use Git on Windows to work with my own sharpOauth library on a Microsoft environment while working on my Office Addin.

I used the following tutorial by nathanj as a reference.

Here are the steps I followed

1. download and install putty in c:\program files\putty
2. download and install msysgit. I picked the package called msysGit-fullinstall-1.7.3.1-preview20101002.exe
3. opening c:\msysgit\msys.bat
4. cd /c/Documents\ and\ Settings/<username>/Mes\ Documents/Workspace
5. /share/msysGit/initialize.sh (say yes when asked to validate)
6. git clone https://samo9789@github.com/samo9789/sharpOAuth.git

I didn’t end up using the graphical interface showed in nathanj’s tutorial which is closed to what I’m used to on OS X. I’d rather have a similar experience with Git cross platform so it’s best that way for me.

That lead me to test Mono, “an open source, cross-platform, implementation of C# and the CLR that is binary compatible with Microsoft.NET” and MonoDevelop, the open source IDE to replace Visual Studio in non Microsoft environments.

1. download the MonoFramework-2.8 for Mac OS X Intel then install it
2. download and install MonoDevelop
3. create a simple console application in C# and compile it
4. run in from the terminal with mono sampleapp.exe

It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Next step, trying to see if I can make a minimal web app using .net on mac or not.

Safari, Dock and Launcher

The launcher

First thing I do is install a launcher (to replace the missing Mac OS X Spotlight). I use Colibri. I have also tried Enso Humanized.

The Dock

The second thing I really miss is the Dock. On Windows I have used Rocket Dock, Object Dock and RK Launcher to replace this important item. Currently I am running RK Launcher and totally hid the Windows taskbar. There is a theme for RK Launcher shared on DevianArt by Asdrubale88 to make your dock look just like the Leopard one.

The theme

At work, on my windows, I run Rocket Dock and HUmanized Enso as a launcher and didn’t go any further. But on my home computer, I always change the default theme to use either or Panther or a Leopard one. There are several availalbe but I usually look for one on Deviant Art or on CrystalXP.net. Right now, I am trying with the MacOSXSmooth from CrystalXP.

Wallapper, Dock and Theme

The Desktop wallpaper

If there is one thing I hate about Windows it’s the default wallpaper with the hills. It never stays on my computer more than 10 minutes after installation. I usually replace it by no wallpaper at all until I have time to look for something else. A good place to start is interfacelift. At the moment, I am using the Apple logo centered on a black backgroung.

The cursor set

It is possible to go further than that and also change the mouse cursors set. An easy to install Mac OS X cursor set is available on Usher.

Expose

If you really want your windows to emulate Mac OS X you can also install an equivalent to Expose like Shock Aero 3D.

Expose-like

More information

I have been doing this [customize Win XP to look like mac] for quite a while but just had to do it again on a reinstallation of my home computer. To find most of these informations back, I read through this post on WikiHow.

• tout d’abord creer le script que j’ai appele “flushTmpFolder.bat”. Celuic-ci a pour contenu :

• Puis, dans le menu executer, entrer la commande “GPEDIT.MSC” et aller dans Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Scripts (Startup / Shutdown).
• Faire un clic droit sur Shutdown et aller dans les proprietes. Cliquer sur ajouter et selectionner le script de flush. Cliquer sur appliquer et fermer les group policy.
• Pour tester, il n’y a plus qu’a redemarrer.

• pour se loguer avec le compte administrateur alors qu’il est inactif (par defaut), il suffit, une fois sur l’ecran de Welcome, de taper CTRL + ALT + DEL deux fois et d’entrer directement le nom du compte “Administrator” et le mot de passe associe.
• pour activer le compte Administrateur (et le faire apparaitre sur l’ecran de Welcome), il faut :

1. lancer la commande lusrmgr.msc
2. cliquer avec le bouton droit sur l’administrateur et aller dans les proprietes
3. decocher la case “le compte est desactive”

Bien sur, il faut garder ses bonnes habitudes heritees du monde Linux et n’utiliser le compte administrateur que pour l’administration du systeme et utiliser un compte limite le reste du temps ; cette manipulation n’a pour seule vocation que de faciliter le passage du compte limite au compte administrateur a travers la fonction de “switch user”.

• Creer un compte administrateur temporaire
• Se deloguer et se reconnecter avec ce nouveau compte
• Lancer une console et taper la commande (ou D est le nom du volume destination)

• Ensuite, lancer regedit pour editer la base de registre.

• Il va falloir trouver toutes les references a c:\documents and settings et les remplacer par le nouveau chemin. On remplacera aussi les occurences de %SYSTEM DRIVE%\Documents and Settings par le nouveau chemin. Pour plus de securite, on verifiera aussi qu’il n’y a aucune occurence de C:\Docume~1 ou de %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Docume~1.
• Redemarrer et passer en mode sans echec. Verifier que les repertoires My Pictures ou My Documents sont bien places sur D:. Supprimer le compte administrateur temporaire et redemarrer a nouveau.

C’etait tout. Bonne chance.