Web based Winamp Control written 4 years ago

Ever had one of those occasions when you’ve wandered off from your computer, leaving your well honed music collection strutting it’s stuff when along comes the Little Mermaid, and plays itself in the middle of your Hard Rock collection? You need a Skip button fast, but where to find one!?

Or perhaps you’re having a party but don’t want any drunken types fiddling where they shouldn’t-be-a-fiddling (let alone choosing which music to play)?

Never fear, using your handy wireless PDA, laptop or other suitably web enabled device you can have full control of winamp, regardless of your physical location!^[1]

What is it?

Using httpq, PHP & XMLHTTPRequest we have developed a fully interactive duplicate of everyone’s favourite media player, embedded in your web brower.

The interface provides all the basic functions such as prev/play/skip/pause/stop, along with the more advanced features like volume control and song seeking.

How does it work?

The web front end interacts with a basic php script which resides on the server, this php script sends the appropriate http requests to the httpq plugin which in turn controls winamp.

Essentially a lot of jiggery pokery. But it works.

Demo

A demo version is available to see just how it works. The password to access this is sennir. Just imagine the title of the song and other stuff looking just like winamp :)

Whodunnit?

This was a joint effort between me and Mr Gregory.

Requirements

Quite a few things needed for this one:

• Winamp : http://www.winamp.com
• httpq : http://httpq.sourceforge.net/
• PHP : http://www.php.net
• A suitable webserver, e.g IIS, or Apache.

All of which can be freely downloaded.

Download

• Current version 1.1 : web_winamp.zip (33kb)

Compatibility

Tested with Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Camino, Opera and Safari.

Support

• Leave a comment below, hope for best :)

^[1]The merit of controlling what music is playing in your bedroom whilst on holiday in shanghai may be minimal — but it’s possible, and that’s all that matters.

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