Dreaming Dreams

And another awesome collaboration between Puik. and Dyne.org!

This weekend we are working on an interactive installation for the yearly Museum N8 festival at the Dutch Institute for Media Art (NIMK).

There will be an 8bit/acid themed VJ set that can be interfaced with 3 gamepad-controllers including force-feedback! All implemented through javascript using the FreeJ software.

See n8.nl for more info.

Very cool stuff. We are rounding up the scripting now and will setup the installation this afternoon.

So, my latest server is now also my music-player. With it I can listen to music at home (it’s attached to my stereo) and also stream it online. On the server I have 2 mpd’s running:

• One as a system-daemon, that anyone can access to control.

• The other runs as user and has a password-protection so only I can modify the playlist (anyone can see the status).

The problem being: How can I listen to both mpd’s on the alsa-output of my server and switch between them with a simple command?

I wrote this little “script” to handle the changes. If you choose to use it, modify according to your settings:

#!/bin/bash

id=$1

## Switch to ‘main’ mpd
if [ $id = main ]
then
## ‘Current’ variables:
export MPD_HOST=<pass-of-user-mpd>@<host>
export MPD_PORT=6601
## Disable and activate main
echo “Switching alsa to main”
mpc disable 1
export MPD_HOST=<host>
export MPD_PORT=6600
mpc enable 1
## Switch to ‘user’ mpd
elif [ $id = user ]
then
echo “Switching alsa to user”
mpc disable 1
export MPD_PORT=6601
export MPD_HOST=<pass-of-user-mpd>@<host>
mpc enable 1
fi
exit 0

Save this to a file in your home-dir. then ‘$ chmod a+x <script>’ and switch with either ‘$ ./<script> main’ or ‘$ ./<script> user’.

If you feel that I have done this very poorly and this could be done better, please comment below