I've already posted a node to CUFP about an MP3 shuffler. This is solving a different problem. The other week I've succeeded in getting audio working on one of my Linux boxes - one with a reasonable sound card. The issue is that my music collection is on a different machine.

Having rejected NFS and Samba shares as an option for getting at the mp3 files, I explore the various options for playing audio, and discover that Kaffeine can take a URL. Excellent! I tweak the server's Apache config, and can now serve music files to my Linux box, when I point a browser at the mp3. Pasting the URL into Kaffeine wasn't completely successful as it couldn't cope with URL escaping, so I needed to manually replace all the %20 with spaces.

Next, I'm thinking that what would be really nice is to prime Kaffeine with a playlist of random tracks from my music collection. Having dug around the file system, I couldn't find where the playlist is stored, but eventually, I realised this was the wrong approach, and discovered the "Save" and "Import" functions. What do they save playlists as? Answer: XML! Bingo! I can now write some Perl to automate the whole process: discover the albums and artists on my server, and make some random selections. Save the URLs, unescaped as an XML file and Bob's your old man's brother.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use WWW::Mechanize;
use XML::Writer;
use IO::File;
use URI::Escape;
use Getopt::Long;

my $server = 'http://orinoco/musicfiles/';
my $ntracks = 10;
my $outfile = 'rand.kaffeine';

GetOptions(
    'server=s'  => \$server,
    'tracks=i'  => \$ntracks,
    'output=s'  => \$outfile,
);


my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new;

$mech->get($server);
my @artists = $mech->find_all_links(text_regex => qr(/$));
my @pick;
for (1..$ntracks) {
    my $rart = int(rand(@artists));
    $mech->follow_link( text => $artists[$rart]->text );
    my @albums = $mech->find_all_links(text_regex => qr(/$));
    my $ralb = int(rand(@albums));
    $mech->follow_link( text => $albums[$ralb]->text );
    my @tracks = $mech->find_all_links(text_regex => qr(^\d\d));
    my $rtk = int(rand(@tracks));
    push @pick, $tracks[$rtk];
    $mech->back;
    $mech->back;
}

my $out = IO::File->new(">$outfile");
print $out "<!DOCTYPE XMLPlaylist>\n"; # Horrible hack: XML::Writer is
+ too strict

my $xml = XML::Writer->new( OUTPUT => $out );
#$xml->doctype('XMLPlaylist', undef, undef);
$xml->startTag( 'playlist', client => 'kaffeine');
for my $track (@pick) {
    $xml->emptyTag( 'entry', url=>uri_unescape($track->url_abs));
}
$xml->endTag('playlist');
$xml->end;
[download]

Enjoy