Hi,

I'm using Radio Shack 2117 remotes to control our stereo system from various places around the house. The goal now is to add a PC to the mix, rip CDs to it, and play the output through the stereo.

The wrinkle is this: most of these systems allow you to "browse" to an album in some way (by genre, artist, title, etc.). All of them allow you to do that browsing from the PC storing the files. Some (squeezebox, Roku) allow you to do it from a separate little device located next to your stereo.

But browsing doesn't work for me, since the people playing the music can be anywhere in the house, and are not in front of the computer!

What I want, I think, is a system that allows me to remotely call up albums by an unchanging "index number". So I could program the remotes to, for example, "play album 147" and a particular album would play.

Has anyone put together a "no look" system? If so, what pieces did you use to do it?

Thanks,

Eric

Take a look at a program called "Girder". You can get it at www.promixis.com and they also have really good forums there which the programmers participate in. Girder will run on your PC and you can basically program it to do anything you want. I haven't used it myself (yet), but it will require some work from you to set it up. It is not a simple plug and play program. Basically, what you do is tell it what action to take when it receives a certain command. ie. if you say play album 1-4-3, it knows that 143 is Bruce Springsteen tracks 1-12 and begins play.

Why not just use a big cd changer like the sony 400 disc or so.
Those have direct access to the discs by slot number.
So you

Remeber the CD you want is in slot 347
Pick up remote
enter 347 enter

The changer starts playing the disc in slot 347


Ripping the CDs and putting them in a computer for this task seems to really over complicate things.

I'm just starting one of these. I'm putting a PC in a closet. I'm going to try & figure out how to do it as a no-look method.

I'm not going to have a huge number of CDs in there, just 1 master playlist.

But I am going to have Internet radio stations. I figured I can have playlists assigned to each, and then lauch them with Girder.

I setup a no-look system with a Pronto type remote, girder and winamp.

take a look at http://brucehartley.com/

I have posted the scripts for sucking the MP3s into a database, you then use supernudelist to create the screen for the pronto.