David Carrington

Not exactly one of the “age old” problems, but an interesting morning challenge: GarageBand lets you stream audio music down from their site - but what if 10 people want to listen to that stream (using headphones) on the same network? VLC player and a PHP-generated playlist was the answer.

My PHP code does a few things:

1. Download all of the GarageBand “Genre” and “Chart” pages
2. Parse those pages for artist links
3. Download every artist’s XML podcast
4. Parse the podcasts for MP3 links
5. Dump the list of MP3s into an M3U playlist

Now what? Well we could all separately download the songs on the playlist and stream from GarageBand. However, that’s not geeky enough - so we’ve got it so Geoff is playing the music through VLC player - and has configured that to broadcast out across the network.

The only annoying problem is that I have to hit play each time a new track comes up as the connection is lost - I’m sure we’ll sort that out.