So, when you're at home,

21 Dec 2001

So, when you’re at home, you have 60 gigs of MP3s, indexed by artist and album – your entire CD collection, in fact.

But, when you’re at work, all you’ve got is a few crappy CDs, and the mp3s of Michael Bolton your coworker keeps forcing on you.

You could set up a web browser and just stream your MP3s at their encoded bitrate, using something like andromeda, but you’ll likely have an angry network admin asking you why you are using a 128 kbit stream 8 hours a day. They don’t like that sort of thing.

So what do you do? Resort to listening to NPR, or random radio stations on shoutcast.com, or .. *gasp* WORKING?!? NEVER!

There is an answer!

First, you go to shoutcast.com and download the shoutcast server and plugin for winamp onto your PC at home. You get that all set up to stream your MP3s. Great! One problem – short of VNCing into your computer, how do you control it?

Enter SnowCrash. The wonder-plugin. It lets you control winamp remotely from a web browser, using IP address authentication to determine if you can administrate it or just view.

Now you can listen to your shoutcast server, which streams your MP3s at a bitrate you choose (I usually use 56kbit, unless the network weather is shitty, in which case I usually go for 24kbit), and control what it’s playing remotely from your machine at work, using snowcrash via the web.

Cool, huh?