Installation

of Be in your Stereo.

Install SoundPlay

Download SoundPlay. I recommend you expand it into /boot/apps. Once expanded, run the SoundPlay installer.

Twiddle SoundPlay's settings

Important! SoundPlay uses a number of plugins to perform audio decoding. When it wants to identify a file, SoundPlay lets each decoder have a look at it, and selects the decoder that claims to understand the file best. Thus, SoundPlay and (by extension) Be in your Stereo perform better when the more common mp3 decoder is asked first.

To arrange that:

  1. Start SoundPlay.
  2. Click on the Settings menu, then Preferences.
  3. In the window that comes up, click on "Decoders" in the left pane.
  4. In the right pane, drag and drop "AMP mpeg decoder" to the top of the list.
Your system will now let the mpeg audio decoder have first crack at recognizing files.

Install the SoundPlay plugin

The installation script provided with this package will:
  1. Build the necessary mp3 indexes and offer to populate them (see "Building an mp3 database", below). Answer no only if you know that you already have such a database, and it is indexed properly.
  2. Offer to install the SoundPlay plugin to the "Plugins" folder for SoundPlay. If you answer no, you'll have to do the installation yourself.
  3. Install a default skin so you can use the program.
  4. Install PHP.
If the installer reports failure -- having several versions of SoundPlay will certainly confuse it -- then you have to do it yourself. Find the SoundPlay directory in Tracker, and drop the Be In Your Stereo program into the Plugins directory.

Building an mp3 database

Be in your Stereo draws on five BFS attributes to gain extra information about the files in your collection: Year, Genre, Artist, Producer and Album. Attributes contian additional information about a file, and can be indexed for quick retrieval.

These audio attributes come pre-installed with BeOS R5, and are automatically installed by a number of systems such as RipEnc and id3attr. The installer script provided in this package will also build the indices and populate them with any information which is currently in your BFS attributes.

If you're like most people, you probably don't initially have much information in your BFS attributes for your audio files. Fortunately, building up this information is easy. The BeOS tip server has a useful article on this topic. The following approach will probably work well:

Making it run forever

This section is skippable for now; come back when you need to set up your Be machine as part of your stereo.

Once you've got your attributes set up:

  1. Place a line like the following in /boot/home/config/boot/UserStartup:

    launch /boot/apps/SoundPlay/SoundPlay

  2. Start SoundPlay, and open its preferences panel. Configure SoundPlay's startup settings (i.e. "resume playing") in a way that seems reasonable.
  3. Turn on Be in your Stereo and configure its settings in a way that seems reasonable.
  4. Quit SoundPlay to save your settings.
  5. Test your machine out by rebooting it, and pointing a web browser at its port 8080 once it starts.
  6. Disconnect everything except your network connection, and place it next to your stereo.
  7. Enjoy the sounds!
  8. If you're using a separate webserver, rather than the built-in one, you'll have to make it run on startup using a similar technique.
There is the important question of how you add files to your collection. This facility is not supported at all by the plugin, so you need to resort to some other tools for now. Some thoughts:
next: usage