Sound Server / News: Recent posts

I've had some real problems today with our chosen form of server XSP http://www.mono-project.com/Downloads and our web service and/or ajax.

For some reason either the web service will not work through another ASP.net client or we have a problem with Ajax call backs somewhere. I have had the webservice running independantly on XSP without real problems but I am not convinced it is ajax either. I have changed the way in which the player libraries work so that we can drop the web service mechanism easily to test this. We need to determine if this will solve our problem because if it does we have a sweet release coming right up!... read more

We have SoundServer operating in a five user environment today. While shiz develops our deployment solution (we're using Cassini for .NET 2 here which we can't redistribute), we'll work out any bugs we find in the office.

The latest CVS build will yeild a winamp plugin based around a Winamp COM implementation I found here: http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/johnadcock

This version works on a basic level but has some known issues that will be either resolved or the Winamp link will be rewritten. I've yet to decide which is the better option.

Current known issues are:
* Seek does not work.
* Current time does not return realistic second values.
* Startup is messy and shut down is as bad!... read more

Because I'm an idiot, the playlist enhancements I detailed last night are *not* in CVS. I will get them in there tonight.

Windows Media Player is giving us grief with regard to .pls files, which is a blocker for our first beta (which will take place in our office). Instead shiz going to write a Winamp plugin for the Service which will allow us to support these files.

This means our first release is delayed by a day.

Today I added support for dynamically loading different sound players based on a setting inside the Web.Config of the web service. This is a little bit difficult to use (and a touch hacked!) and I intend to extend the web service interface to support better configuration some time in the future.

I've also added basic .pls support for the windows media player com plugin. This does appear to work on a basic level but not for that many streams. Windows media player 10 appears to be reluctant to play them when the location is entered manually and the com interface does not have any luck either. I think this implies a basic limit of windows media player which is why I intend to improve the dynamic assembly loading a bit better then create a plugin for either winamp or foobar2000.

I've just committed the new changes to the playlist display that I talked about earlier today.

If we get the ability to play .pls files tonight then I think we will try and do our first beta-test in our office tomorrow or Tuesday. If this is successful then we'll probably do our first release on Wednesday or Thursday!

I'm going to try and finish some enhancements to the playlist today. Using Ajax, the playlist will be updated in real time to reflect what song is playing and any changes that are made to it by other users.

I'm also adding in the ability to click an item on the playlist to make it play straight away.

At the same time I'm going to refactor some of the javascript to allow the UI to get updated more quickly and to use the client-server connection more efficiently.

Thanks to the power of RSS and the magic of roo (aka SoundServer dev absnape), news on posted on our sourceforge project page will get automatically included in our homepage at http://soundserver.sourceforge.net. Nice one Rupert!

The seek handle in the WebUI now moves to track the current position in the song. This responds to other user's actions - if someone in one browser uses it to seek this will be instantly reflected in the browsers of other users.

I also fixed some other miscellanous bugs with the same checkin - the commit comment details these.

The initial design of SoundServer's UI is up there, as is a screenshot of the first usable version of SoundServer - yes, it works!

We've added some content to <a href="http://soundserver.sourceforge.net/" title="SoundServer">the SoundServer sourceforge homepage</a> - a roadmap and our current status.

We committed two modules to CVS last night - SoundService (our webservice) and SoundServer (our webUI). These are mostly-functional and definitely alpha status.