Using lpd to spool MP3s (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Using lpd to spool MP3s (2003)

patrick.wagstrom.net

22 pointswtbob15 comments

I wrote this article 12 years ago and it took me until I saw my own name in the comments to realize it was my own article. Now I want to take the advice of the commenters and make it work for YouTube videos our animated gifs - except have them play on a large LED array.

This brings back some great memories if trying to explain to my the girlfriend why I didn't want to go look at engagement rings, "Y'know that old computer under my desk with the noisy fan? Right now thousands of nerds are visiting it to read an article about how I used the printer system to play music."

Fwiw - the original is still up: http://patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog/2003/05/23/lpdforfunandmp...

I love how standard Unix tools can be repurposed for other uses. Granted, sometimes it's not the most efficient thing possible (like those databases built on sed & awk), but it's still nifty—and in the case of playing music, it really does make a lot of sense.

idk, change mp3 to youtube, the article is instant relevant today.

I'm tempted to try youtube-dl in place of the audio players and try it out.

mpv can directly play youtube urls, so you can just do e.g.

    mpv --vo=null https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Just in case the server does die, here's a snapshot someone took a few minutes ago: https://archive.is/TkaU4

I've just realised, you could use a networked queue and something like `mpd` to make a multi-user music system... but at that stage you might just want to pay for Spotify.

If you're interested in that, see groovebasin. It only plays your local music, but it does allow multi-user access to a shared stream.

Neat!

...could you use it as an init system?

Cute idea... Has anybody tried this with CUPS?

Ok, we've changed the URL from http://pipan.org/mirror/lpd-mp3/ to yours. Was that an unauthorized copy?

Edit: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10378327 and marked it off-topic.

>LPD for fun and MP3 playing

>FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY SOMEONE PLEASE MIRROR THIS!

>This little server runs on a junk AMD-K6 200 over a terrestrial wireless broadband link from sprint. Connection suck? Yup, that's my wonderful 15k/s max upload stream. I really slashdot would ask before doing this sort of stuff.

>I haven't even installed ALTQ yet to prioritize my connections, so I can't get out. Oh well, have some fun. Post a mirror on slashdot's comment section.

I'd hope the K6 is gone by now, but that's probably the original reason for the mirror.

Ah, thanks.

It's not an unauthorized mirror. The whole deal was that I was serving the content from an old computer off a residential broadband line. Well, it wasn't even broadband - it was this interesting wireless service in Chicago from Sprint that bounced signals off the Sears Tower. Anyway, Slashdot got it and my machine melted, so I put a plea for mirrors at the top of the page (my writing has improved dramatically since I wrote the plea, please don't judge). This was back in the day before automatic mirroring services existed. Also, I was a very poor grad student at the time, so I didn't have a VPS that could have handled the bandwidth.

Carry on then. It's all good.

Heh, I must have seen it on Slashdot all those years ago, and picked up that mirror link. Thanks for posting it, and thanks for keeping your site going!

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