DIY - Control iTunes from a Mac SE/30

Setup: iMac 20" with iTunes installed and running in office. Streaming music to AirPort base station in living room.

This setup has served me pretty well for playing music from my collection or streaming media while having dinner with friends or cleaning the house. As long as I am happy with the music, it works great. But throw in a party of people, with different tastes and the changing needs for music over the course of an evening, and you have a new problem.

Problem: How to control iTunes from behind my home bar while bartending.

Solution: I needed a "remote" that could change, pause, resume, and search my iTunes library.

There is a helpful tutorial that basically uses the built-in Apache server that comes with OS X. People have used this to control iTunes with things like their web-enabled cell phone and a Sony PSP. This seems like a great idea, and I will probably do this soon so I can change tunes from another apartment. This also seemed like a bigger project than I had time for (guests coming over in a couple hours). Besides, I wanted a slightly more "retro" solution. What to do then?

First, I knew that I could get a web-browser running on one of several old macs I had, but the easiest would be the Mac SE/30 FD/HD that was part of my dust collection experiment/Apple museum. It had a built in ethernet card, so I knew it would be online quickly. Run one long CAT5 cable from the hub in the office, to its location beind the bar and plug it in. Powerup and launch Netscape 4.07 (You can find many old browsers here. You will be able to find one that runs on almost any old computer you have). Cool! I now have a Net connection behind the bar. If books weren't so easy to use, I could look up recipes for drinks on it!

Second, what can I connect to to control iTunes? After several attempts with different programs, I settled on browserTunes by Mark Burgess. The last version is 0.2.2 and it was signifigantly less buggy than 0.2.1 (Which I found and tried first). Load this application on the computer that has iTunes and is streaming to your AirPort Base Station. After clicking "Load DB" in the preferences pane (which scans your music library and builds a SQL database) and finding the IP address of your computer, go to the remote computer and put the IP number in the address field of the browser (http://###.###.###.###:8080) You should get some form of page (depending on settings, I chose the PDA type, just to keep things simple for the SE) that has next, back, pause/play, volume, etc. All of the controls I need! You should also see choices for search and playlists, the two most important in my opinion. Music too much for late night? Search Genre for "Downtempo" and hit play all! One thing I ran into a lot was that it wouldn't automatically remember that I want to shuffle after changing genre/artists/playlist/whatever. Easy solution? add "shuffleon" to the end of the current URL (http://###.###.###.###:8080/shuffleon) and the music starts shuffling again!

Further steps: I realised that most of what this program does is send simple XML formatted requests to the browserTunes software. If I were to make a simple HTML page that had some of the ones I used a lot, it would look cooler, and I could design it for the B&W screen on the Mac SE. In general, this setup works really well, and until I get the low-power radio transmitter working and need to control the music from other aprtments in my building, I will leave the Apache version alone.

Pictures coming soon!