Words like “fuck” (OMG!) and “shit” (OMG!) are now garbled messes. Thank-you whoever fuckhead decided this was a good idea. You are a dickhead. A fuckbrain. A no-hoping moron. A fucking lunatic. A spastic deranged moron with a fucking shoe for a brain. Eat a bag of dicks.

*deep breath*

OK, I think I’m over it now. But censored music is still fucking stupid.

Having voiced my opinion on this topic several times in the past, I left the thread alone for a time until there were comments I could just not ignore. I was rewarded of course after only 119 posts with this:

The major and minor thing some people here want are “free” downloads of intellectual property, such as movies, games, software, music, and other copyrighted material. You want stuff for free. It’s not about property rights, it’s about the intention to possess and use something you do not want to pay the asked price for. If it were not for the possibility to get your hands on such material via file sharing, there would not be any discussion.

I responded with this:

http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?30,767183

The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact – it sucks as the musician BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So… have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process

And the poster I responded to responded to me with this:

Copyrighted material, including music is not free, was never free, and will never be free. Such false statements are the core of the problem. Some kids might even believe the nonsense.

My response:

There will never be a technological means to prevent file sharing on the scale that it exists today. It may be reduced somewhat, and others may be discouraged with new laws, but everything that exists in an uncontrollable format today will always exist, as is, in one way or another, accessible by the general public for free.

Perhaps new technologies will prevent future releases from being piratable, but I very much doubt that. BluRay is supposedly “un-piratable” but it is regularly pirated. Look at BluRay adoption versus DVD sales. BluRay is slowly and steadily gaining market share, but it is nowhere near surpassing that of DVD. This is in part due to the fact that people don’t care about the great features of BluRay (I personally love hi-def), but it would also be because people do not want to buy into such a restrictive format.

The more control the labels have over the end-users use of a product or service, the less that informed people will want to make use of said service. DRM is a failure, so now the labels have changed tacts and laws are being changed. Will it work? I personally don’t think so.

I will continue to buy CDs and transcode them to my preferred digital format irrespective of the legality of such an action (I actually believe this was made legal in Australia in the last few years). I will also continue to download high-quality rips of CDs for the purposes of evaluation before I decide to buy them. This is illegal in Australia. Do I end up buying CDs that I download? Yes. What do I do with albums I don’t buy? Honestly, I just keep them. I never listen to them, so I could delete them. I’m just too lazy to do so. Anyway, I don’t really see a problem with this. I don’t share my music collection with others.

According to you, and the law, I am stealing. According to me, I am stealing, but there is no victim. I don’t listen to music that I don’t like, and the artist isn’t missing any money that I “stole” by not paying. Maybe I should purge my collection of artists I don’t listen to; that’d probably make you happy, but I personally am not bothered. I have no concern for labels because I believe they are dishonest anyway.

His response:

Of course there is a victim. The copyright owner who is supposed to get a fee. We have covered this, even if you believe that the labels are dishonest, our law system does not allow you take from them. Also: This has only partially to do with “labels”, illegal downlands are not only referring to music. What about the thousands of companies and their staff who produce games and software that is illegally distributed by file sharing? How about the production companies that produce movies that are illegally distributed by file sharing, or direct downloads?

My response:
“Our law system does not allow you to take from them” – well, actually it does. I could at any time decide to download literally several terabytes of pirated music which is freely available on the internet. The practicality of the matter is what you seem to be ignoring. Or, in another way, the impracticality of preventing the spread of such material is what you seem to be ignoring. This kind of spreading cannot be stopped, and instead of embracing this method of distribution, the labels are sticking their head in the sand. As Trent Reznor says, it’s better that fans download direct from the source rather than from an unknown website.

An interesting note is that those who are wanting to abolish or change copyright law really are doing themselves and the artists they love a disservice by spreading this kind of sentiment. The Creative Commons relies on copyright law to support it. The original owner should maintain copyright on their material (reading between the lines: the artists should maintain copyright, not the labels). This gives them the freedom to licence their material under a Creative Commons style licence. In other words, it gives the true owner the power to disseminate their works as they see fit. This is a fundamental right and this copyright law should not be changed, save for some small wording amendments which may be made to reduce the ambiguity surrounding “free downloads” versus “illegal downloads”.

I’ll say this straight: I believe that pirating any material is wrong, but what I am saying is that I believe my use of this material should not be considered piracy. I do not download movies (they are poor quality and without special features, the main selling points of the original material). I only download games that are no longer available for purchase (be it from a bricks and mortar store or online at sites like www.gog.com). It’s kind of funny really how woefully inadequate most companies are at keeping an up-to-date back catalogue of their material, be it music, games or movies, but I digress.

What I do with music, as I outlined previously, is not stealing. I download an evaluation copy and then if I like it I buy it and if I don’t, I don’t listen to it anymore. I am no longer using this material, thus it is no different than if I visited a record store every day and listened to the album in-store and decided not to buy it after a week. The difference is that I don’t have to waste my time in a record store by using technology to overcome the problem. Record labels should embrace this: they will sell more. It’s pretty straightforward.

This is an ongoing discussion and I will update this post in the future, but what are your thoughts so far?

Specifically, Dell and Asus.

Why? Dell, because their computer systems are nearly always Linux compatible from top to bottom. My Dell XPS M1330 laptop is a perfect example; everything works out of the box with Ubuntu Linux (even the media keys!). The same goes for most of their other models. Dell typically uses quality hardware components which aren’t manufactured by obscure impersonators. Also, apparently they’re really interested in what their customers have to say.

Why Asus? I haven’t ever really thought much of Asus in the past. I used to think their products were overpriced and under-performing. Maybe I was right five years ago, but things change. Today, I have many Asus products which I find to be of excellent quality and well worth the associated price premium over similar products. My desktop machine is based on an Asus motherboard; it has more bells and whistles than I will probably ever use, but the knowledge I can in future is nice. Not only that, but the Asus uses superior power delivery circuitry than most other motherboards.

My sound card is an Asus sound card; this is great. For a long time, Creative were the only company making sound cards worth buying. Consequently, they got lazy and barely innovated. Their product updates brought little improvement, and their support was atrocious. Knowing they were the only vendor worth giving money, they pretty much stopped caring. If you’ve ever tried to search for drivers for a Creative sound card on the internet, you’ll know what I mean.

So, I was glad to not buy a Creative product. The Asus Xonar DX in my desktop system is arguably the best sound card for its price, and it works well with my Alessandro MS-1 headphones. Not the best solution for gaming, but I don’t care too much – I prefer the clarity, richness and size of the soundscape that this combination gives me in music.

However, recently, I decided that it was rather ridiculous for me to turn on my desktop machine just to listen to music while working on my laptop. (I am a bit of an audiophile – no, the inbuilt sound in my laptop is nice and all, but not really good enough for me.) So, I went ahead and bought myself a shiny new toy, also Asus: the Xonar U1. Essentially, a USB version of the Xonar DX. I did a little research beforehand to ensure it would work in Linux – thankfully, it does. As it uses similar hardware to the other products in the Xonar range, a driver was already available. (No thanks to Asus for this of course – they’re not that good). Currently the hardware volume control of the device doesn’t appear to work, nor does digital-out at present, but I don’t really use either, so I am not worried. I care more about the quality of the output, which is great for a $63 piece of equipment.

So, I plugged it in, configured my sound devices through the PulseAudio configurator, and now I’m happily enjoying high-quality music through my laptop just as I would my desktop! This also eliminates the need for me to remote desktop into my desktop to change the song, which is another story of horribleness courtesy of Microsoft arbitrarily defining ‘Home’ versions of Vista as being incapable of supporting remote desktop technology (I use VNC, it is a pain as it has to be started in user mode, it is blocked by the kernel due to “security reasons” if I try to run the service).

Anyway, this is pretty much a post inspired by my being chuffed at succeeding in having things the way I want them. At the end of the day, that’s what life is all about, right?

I have been collecting various images for inspiration – most of them official wallpapers from the various albums of NIN. I also have some official tour photos, some amateur tour photos, and some other interesting imagery. I have been thinking, though, that perhaps I don’t want to get a NIN tattoo – perhaps I want one that is about something more general, like industrial music, or even just music itself. However, these categories seem even more daunting to contemplate than just NIN.

I can tell straight away that I don’t think I would like to tattoo myself with something generic like industrial music – it’s too broad. Besides, it would imply that I love industrial music as a whole. I do not. I appreciate many fine artists whose work could be tentatively considered industrial music, but as a whole I do not love the genre itself. I don’t even fully agree with the naming of the genre. That rules that out.

As for music … well, once again I’m getting the whole ‘generic’ vibe here. When I say that I want a NIN related tattoo, it’s not necessarily something like a NIN logo. It’s more about capturing some of the emotions, beliefs and thoughts that are played in my mind’s eye, inspired by the music that NIN create. It would be wrong for me to get a “music” themed tattoo and simply declare that “I love music”. It’s like saying “I love air”. Well, of course I love air. I need it to live. I hold music in the same reverence – I do not worship music as a whole, but I cannot live without it.

However, as I sit here listening to Fear Factory’s Hatefiles album; an album full of some of the best industrial music I’ve heard, I am wondering if perhaps I am artificially limiting myself by desiring to choose something that is only NIN-related. But, even now as I think about it, the emotions and thoughts that I associate with NIN are also associated with Fear Factory and the like, but I believe in a different way.

Some time passes…

However: after listening to Fear Factory for some time this evening, I come to the conclusion that what I think of them, while many of their tracks are energetic, fun, and help me to concentrate on some of my darker emotions – mostly anger, and in some cases hate – these are not the emotions that I wish to get tattoo’d permanently onto my skin. Fear Factory is really great to go absolutely FUCKING SPASTIC to, but they’re not what I’m after in a tattoo. At the moment.

I want my tattoo to have some deeper meaning … something that Fear Factory doesn’t provide. Oh, sure, I still get angry, and I still feel what I believe is akin to hatred toward certain things, but these feelings no longer occupy as much of my time as they once did, back in my angsty teen days. At the moment, Nine Inch Nails’ music provokes some of the deepest emotional exploration I’ve yet to experience from any music. Artists like Cog, Karnivool and Tool also provide deep, emotional investigations, but these artists are relatively new to me, and I would not commit myself to loving them as much as I do NIN just yet. With Cog and Karnivool, both new bands, I am yet to come to rely upon them as a whole – having only released two full albums each, I cannot yet know whether or not in the future I will surely enjoy their music, and I cannot yet know, more importantly, whether I fully agree with the sentiment expressed in future music. I don’t feel as though they’re yet old enough, as an entity, for me to base such a pivotal decision upon.

Tool has released many albums, but I don’t like all of them… not yet, anyway. I am slowly coming to appreciate their older material, but I am presently fixated mainly on Lateralus and to a lesser extent 10,000 Days – both extremely complex and technical albums, while their older material, from what I’ve heard (which is admittedly limited), is not less technical, but more raw – which is not a bad thing. I haven’t yet come to appreciate it.

So, that leads me then to trying to explain about why I like NIN so much – there isn’t a NIN song that I can’t listen to. Sure, some of the tracks from Pretty Hate Machine and With Teeth aren’t my favourites – PHM because, as with Tool, the sound is raw, and Teeth because it doesn’t take the same format as most of NIN’s other work. A quote from Trent Reznor himself:

About five or six songs into writing it, the songs started to sound good on their own and they didn’t need this framework to work together,” and that With Teeth consists of “a collection of songs that are friends with each other, but don’t have to rely on each other to make sense”, however, the album’s narrative arc describes “a difficult journey that begins with a nightmare and ends with acceptance of a new reality.” (source)

And from the July 2009 issue of UK Kerrang! magazine, talking about With Teeth:

The first recorded (sic) by the newly sober Reznor he later described it as a “cautious” album, one that he admits wouldn’t be his “favourite NIN record today”. “Looking back, I can see I wasn’t completely sure of myself,” he said. “[After] I got sober… I took a few years just trying to stay alive and feel comfortable in my own skin before I jumped back into work to possibly fail.”

So, there are some songs that I am not a great fan of. That isn’t to say that With Teeth is not an important album in NINs history and discography (without it, we may not have had Year Zero or any of the following albums!); merely that it is not my favourite entry. Nor is it Trent’s.

So that’s a little about the songs which aren’t my favourite. How about the ones that are? I honestly don’t know where to start with that – there is so much quality in the NIN discography I am almost overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to discuss it all!

In fact, that’s quite a good thing, really. This article is now already 1100-ish words long. I won’t kill my readers interest with an amateur analysis of music. I’ll just list my thoughts.

I really like the song Echoplex from The Slip. Awesomely, each song from The Slip is accompanied by a piece of artwork. As the discussion on the ninwiki page goes:

The artwork may symbolize someone being surrounded by sound, as if it were echoing around them. It may also symbolize walls around the person, which makes sense due to the lyrics making a reference to sound bouncing off of walls.

The lyrics suggest a scenario where someone has been in solitary confinement for too long, driving him or her, to insanity, where “you will never ever get to me in here.” Another possible scenario is a direct link between the lyrics present on this song and “Demon Seed” (“You feel me breathe” on “Echoplex” vs. “I can hear it breathe”). They could also be extremely literal, referring to the solitude of wherever frontman Trent Reznor comes up with his music.

An interesting facet of the artwork is the red scribbling line which seems to pass through and around the inside of the echoplex – this scratching appears in many of the other art pieces for The Slip and suggests that these songs are somehow interconnected and related. My thinking was that I could have the echoplex artwork as the start of my tattoo. It would represent me and how I interact with the world: from behind the safety and security of my echoplex, I allow a small channel – or, I am forced to have a small channel – of communications to the outside world.

The scratching could represent many specific things (stream of consciousness, blood, physical connectedness), but mostly I see it as communication, with all of the aforementioned concepts coming under the communication umbrella concept.

Thus, I need to decide what satellite concepts surround my echoplex. Some will be directly connected via my communications channel, and others, perhaps not. Also, I am thinking that I will have to expand upon the available NIN artwork repository before I can come up with some suitable imagery. No doubt I will be taking concepts from some of the work present on The Downward Spiral, and perhaps some more from The Slip, but perhaps not so literally. So many of the concepts explored in all of the NIN albums are without existing imagery — I will have to get arty and create my own!

• Nine Inch Nails – Ruiner: I love this track because it puts into the form of lyrics many of my emotions, and puts into the form of music my will to overcome those emotions. The song is essentially accusing the Ruiner of destroying the protagonists’ life through betrayal, deceit, and hardship. The protagonist struggles to understand how the Ruiner became so powerful, and acknowledges that the Ruiner has seriously fucked things up. In the end, the protagonist resolves to continue anyway…
• Karnivool – Synops: This is not my favourite Karnivool song. I actually don’t have a favourite Karnivool song, because I love them all. I picked this one however, because I believe it is a great example of how Ian Kenny’s voice has the power to inspire any emotion, with the right combination of lyrics and music. In this song, I believe the protagonist is struggling with an inner turmoil, and is having trouble understanding how it affects him.
• Cog – The Spine:This song explores the haphazard lifestyle that many people lead. If you were to read the lyrics without music, it may come across as a string of terrible haikus. I love it because it questions the listener: are you really sure that what you’re doing is what you want out of life? The lyrical talent of Flynn Gower, combined with the powerful driving music carries the song through to the end at great speed, leaving the listener pondering the questions raised through the lyrics. I love the guitar solo.
• Ponyloaf – Aargh’s Townhouse: This is a near perfect example of how to make awesome electronic music without ruining it by having someone attempt to sing over the top of it. This is simply a great song to dance to. It’s also very good to put on as background music while you’re thinking, or doing something else – tone down the bass, and you have an extremely logical and progressive track that makes getting things done rewarding.
• Pendulum – Through The Loop: A near-perfect example of how to make awesome drum’n'bass music without ruining by having someone rap/rhyme over the top of it. The quote from the original ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ film of 1971 is perfectly tweaked to fit in with the song, and the emotion in the voice peaks right at the perfect moment: the higher pitched music slowly builds, and then, WHAM! The bass hits and you are dumped into a rollercoaster ride of epic proportions. This song is a fucking blast to dance to, and it never gets old.
• System of a Down – Vicinity Of Obscenity: This one’s quite the euphemism, isn’t it? Apparently the song is about anal sex. I must admit I never really picked up on that before doing a little reading into it, but hey, it works. I love this song because it’s so crazily energetic like most SOAD tracks; you can sing it loud and proud and most people won’t know what the fuck you’re on about!
• Fear Factory – Edgecrusher: I love this song because it is the epitome of anger, expression and making your fucking point heard. It’s about the Edgecrusher, a machine with a singular purpose: to destroy human life. The protagonist sings about his history and how his singular purpose is to destroy the Edgecrusher. This song is similar in theme to Ruiner by Nine Inch Nails, but while the protagonist in Ruiner expresses his emotions with quiet reserve and controlled words, the protagonist in Edgecrusher screams his purpose to the world.
• Death From Above 1979 – Romantic Rights (The Phone Lovers Remix): This remix heavily samples the chorus, which brings about my own interpretation of the song: I started listening to these guys right around the time I met my beloved Carly, and the song has very special meaning for me.
• Nine Inch Nails – We’re In This Together: After reading the lyrics, you can come to a pretty straightforward conclusion that this is some kind of love song. Well, I think that it is, and it isn’t. It’s a typical love song in the sense of the singer’s need to cling to someone, but I personally interpret it as a song of friendship. The ubiquitous and ambiguous L-word is never mentioned. Great to sing along to.
• Nine Inch Nails – Meet Your Master: When taken literally, and in context with the Year Zero ARG, it would appear this song is a message from the resistance to the government, or perhaps vice-versa. However, I take the song less literally: I interpret it as being a general “you had your chance, now it’s my turn” or “now I will prove myself to you” type song, which encourages me to do my best and really put effort into what I’m trying to achieve. It’s also pretty damn awesome to dance to, and the lyrics melt together in a way that makes singing along with the song very easy.

So, that’s my list: what’s yours?

I am pretty sure it’s going to be NIN-related. I am not going to get a standard NIN logo tattoo; but I will probably get something abstract that is related to NIN or influenced by NIN. Why? Well, I’m not sure yet. Figuring out why is part of the process. I do know that I really, really love NIN, and all NIN music, and everything related to the whole uNINverse … (haha, see what I did there?) …

Anyway, it’s definitely something NIN-related. The era, I’m not sure. Perhaps a synergy of themes from multiple eras. Perhaps just two eras, or even one. That’d be too hard to decide, though. Do I really identify with the self-deconstructive anthems of The Downward Spiral, the continuation of which occurs through The Fragile, or am I more inclined to think of myself through the eyes of society and how I fit into our bleak future, ala Year Zero?

These are my three favourite NIN albums, and I will be considering themes, artwork, lyrics and music from each seperately, and together, before making any decisions. This means a lot to me.

There are plenty of ideas around – check out the many online examples … I don’t want to copy anyone else, but I will be using those as an example of how to expect mine to turn out, and about what other people may think of it … not that the latter is really important to me at all, because this is a personal journey I will be undertaking.

Some of you may think I’m putting way too much thought into this and I should simply get whatever I love most about NIN tattoo’d onto me, and maybe I will… that isn’t to say I won’t think about alternatives, compositions, and new ideas first.

NIN is… it’s something I really appreciate. It’s some of the only music I can listen to which I feel a real, wholesome, emotional attachment to. It’s something I can enjoy almost any time, any day, anywhere. It’s beautiful, ugly, wonderous, destructive, awesome and cataclysmic… it’s everything.

• Friday: worked from home. Went out with Carly for dinner, late at night, because it was our two-year anniversary.
• Saturday: went over to Tate’s place to learn about Ruby, and Ashley came too. In fact, he gave me a lift there and back. Saturday night, went to my mate Dave’s 21st. It was pretty fun!
• Sunday: didn’t do much during the day, just relaxed. Sunday night, went to see Karnivool who were fucking epic!

That’s the summary. I might write the rest when I could be bothered. Or not.

The end.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

Introduction

As I am now living in my own place with people of my generation who understand my desire to have “everything now” (as most other late Generation X-ers and early Generation Y-ers will understand), I have decided that it is time to build myself a media centre for use in the lounge/common room.

The popularity of digital media management solutions has steadily risen over the past few years. Solutions based around commodity PC hardware and open-source operating systems have been around since 2002 at least, with commercial options such as TiVo being available for a few years beforehand.

Although TiVo has been available in America and surrounding countries for nearly 10 years now, it has only recently become avilable in countries such as Australia, Taiwan etc more recently. Thus contributing to the popularisation (amongst geeks at least) of free/open-source solutions such as the aforementioned MythTV.

Software

It is this software system, on top of my as always favourite Linux operating system that I will build my media centre solution. I have decided that using Arch will be ideal for a few reasons:

1. it’s fast. With my older hardware, this is important, especially when considering playback of HD content
2. I know how to use it.
3. I prefer some “under the hood” access – configuring everything from scratch, for me, is not a chore. I prefer it to having everything set to defaults like with Ubuntu/Mythbuntu. With either of those distributions, I’d end up changing all the defaults anyway.

Hardware

My hardware of choice is my ex-gaming PC, a veteran system by today’s standards which is over four years old now!

• AMD Athlon64 3400+ (2400Mhz)
• DFI LANParty UT nForce 250GB
• 2x512Mb Corsair Dual-Channel RAM
• Albatron nVidia GeForce 6800GT 256Mb
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1

Storage

Currently the system has about 480GB of storage spread across three seperate hard drives (the joys of incremental upgrades). However, due to the planned dual-role of this computer as media centre and secure backup/storage system, I will be buying some new drives and setting up a simple software RAID system of SATA disks. With the ridiculous cost of hard disk storage solutions these days, where off-the-shelf 1TB drives command an approximate cost of 16 cents per gigabyte, there will be no shortage of disk space.

For reasons of performance and reliability I will buy at least two identical drives (probably a pair of Western Digital 7200RPM ‘Green Power’ drives) and place them in a RAID1 configuration. Whether I will use the onboard RAID capabilities of the system board or an implementation in software (mdadm) is largely irrelevant in terms of performance as both rely on the CPU to perform RAID-related calculations. However, using the software solution will abstract the RAID functions from the hardware, which will eliminate the single point of failure. If the motherboard were to be replaced, I would effectively lose my RAID system, and all data with it. The underlying hardware is irrelevant in this scenario when using software RAID.

Video Capture

Finding the right video capture card isn’t going to be as easy as the rest of the hardware. While there is a lot of information (MythTV hardware wiki, OCAU MythTV Wiki) available about which are the best cards to buy, it is a matter of matching the exact cards which are known as fully working to those actually available for purchase.

For example, the Leadtek DTV-2000H is a well-rounded card which offers the features I require. However, there are two different revisions available, the ‘I’ revision and the ‘J’ revision. The former works flawlessly and the latter has intermittent problems and requires a lot more tweaking to get it to play nicely. Both cards use the same highly recommended chipset (Connextant 2388x) but apparently are different enough to cause problems (see the MythTV wiki entry for this card). This makes my choice a very difficult one as retailers generally aren’t too happy about having customers open boxes and inspect hardware version numbers prior to a purchase being made.

Remote Control

The only other hardware consideration I have is what remote control to use. Some of the available video capture cards come with their own, or I may buy another. It is an incidental cost in the grand scheme of things but adds so much functionality to the system. I do not want to have a keyboard and mouse hanging around in my loungeroom if I can avoid it, and indeed, I can. More to the point, though, a remote control with familiar buttons makes the system much more accessible to the non-technical people who will be using the system, and that increases the chances it’ll be used.

Conclusion

As this is only part one of my upcoming series of posts on the matter, you will have to wait a week or two until I’ve properly researched my hardware choices, made my purchases and begun the build. Rest assured though, I’ll do a full write-up!

• The Hardware

  The hardware I chose to use was rather limited in performance, which I think illustrates the efficiency of the software and solution which I designed. Components were as follows:

  • CPU: Pentium II 300Mhz
  • RAM: 384Mb SDRAM
  • Motherboard: Intel i440BX-based
  • Video: S3 Virge DX/3D
  • Storage: 4Gb, 5400RPM ATA HDD
  • Sound: Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1

  Obviously, I chose the software based on the known limitations of this hardware. Luckily I had a spare SoundBlaster Live! card, because I don’t think the system would’ve been able to reliably handle the music playback and the overheads of the user interface without it. Of course, whatever hardware you plan on using will probably be much faster. I really did pull this box right out of the stone age.

• The Operating System

  The operating system I chose in order to optimise performance was of course my favourite Linux operating system: Arch Linux. With the kernel, modules and all packages being i686-optimized, it was a good starting point for a “from scratch” jukebox system. More importantly though is that after installation of the base system, I had a basic, but fully working, command line Linux system at my disposal. This meant there were no unnecessary startup services, configurations and other settings which would have been useless, redundant or otherwise a hinderence to performance on this slow system.

• The Desktop Environment

  I chose to install XFCE as the desktop environment because it is the most lightweight of the ‘fully-featured’ environments. I would have liked to use an even lighter option, but of all the specialty and niche options available, I had never used any before, and this build was to be completed in a few hours. So, I chose XFCE which I found behaved no differently to GNOME, but was still relatively responsive despite limited system resources.

  To make the GUI look decent, I had to install a few additional packages that are not explicit dependencies of XFCE. They are listed below.

  • ttf-ms-fonts – the easiest way to make websites look nice is by installing this font package
  • midori – a lightweight, Webkit based browser for GTK+ environments. I chose this over Firefox due to the AJAX-heavy nature of the relaxx player. Webkit is supposedly superior in performance compared to alternatives

• The Webserver

  Now, you may be wondering why, with such a limited system, I was bothering with so many layers of abstraction between music, player and control. The reason is that none of the music playing applications I investigated (and there were quite a few) offered any functionality near that of a simple party jukebox. So, I had to use a web-based front end for mpd called relaxx, both of which I’ll talk about soon.

  The webserver of choice is lighttpd; a light weight simple web server, with all the features (and a lot more) required for what I had in mind.

• The Music Daemon

  Simply put: mpd. Or, Music Player Daemon, as it is less commonly known. I chose this system for multiple reasons: first and foremost, its awesome efficiency. With my 80Gb music collection catalogued and at my immediate disposal, mpd uses approximately three megabytes of system memory. Yes, you read that correctly: three. megabytes. If I go ahead and do something silly like, say, add my entire music collection into a single playlist, that number jumps to a staggering (!!!) eight megabytes. Yeah, I know. It’s ridiculous.

  Secondly, due to the daemon nature of mpd, you can use any frontend you like. You can use a text-based terminal application, you can use a GTK+, Qt or other, or you can use a web-based application, like relaxx player.

• The Music Frontend

  This is the party piece — the piece of the system that everyone gets to see. I chose relaxx player because it had some of the functionality that provides jukebox-like behaviour. Well, kind of. It essentially only had one major feature that made it stand out from a variety of other mpd front-ends: multi-user capability. Essentially, you could lock down certain features of the interface for anonymous users, and require a login for those functions. So, essentially that meant I could specify that anonymous users were only allowed to add songs to the playlist and press play. Meaning you had to log in to delete tracks, stop, pause or rewind, etc.

  The installation of relaxx was straightforward, but I had to install a few extra packages under Arch to make it work properly:

  • Arch wiki: Getting relaxx to work with Arch

  This was the only part of the system which didn’t quite work out so well. Its functionality was great, but due to the fact that it’s programmed entirely in AJAX, the old Pentium II powering the computer couldn’t quite keep up. It was slow to respond and not very nice to use, but it was usable. The music itself never skipped a beat (literally), but the performance of this frontend left something to be desired.