Remote Control Winamp

Winamp has never ceased to amaze, ever since its inception to the Winamp 3 Final release that’s just come out. Its beauty lies in its plug-ins, which let you do a lot of cool things with it. This time, we will use a couple of plug-ins to enable you to directly control your Winamp from another machine on a network, or even through a Web browser. 

Direct connection 



The plug-in used here is called Cubicle Jukebox. It exposes Winamp’s controls through a port for the client software to access from another networked machine. There isn’t much to configure in the Cubicle Jukebox plug-in. Just install it like any other plug-in and restart Winamp. It resides as a General Purpose plug-in. Once installed, copy the file called ‘Cubicle Client’ (from Winamp’s Plugins directory) to the machine you want to control it from. Run this application from the client machine, hit Ctrl+R and enter the hostname or IP address of the parent Winamp machine that you want to control. Just ensure that the port number specified here matches what you’ve entered in the host machine’s configuration settings. Hit ‘Connect’ and you should see the playlist of the host Winamp. Rest is self-explanatory. You have the entire regular playback controls along with shuffle, repeat, select and even a volume control. A convenient search box has also been thrown in to search through the remote

playlist. 

Cubicle Jukebox allows you to access Winamp’s controls from another networked machine

Through a Web browser



For this, we’ll use another Winamp plug-in called BrowseAmp, (which is also on this month’s CD). It runs a Web server on the host machine that serves Winamp’s controls over HTTP to any remote Web browser. Here is how to configure it.

Install the plug-in and restart Winamp on the host machine. Go to Winamp Preferences and to the ‘General Purpose Plugins’ option. Click on BrowseAmp and press ‘Configure’. The only configuration you will need to do is the MP3 root directory. This gives access to the directory from a Web browser such that the client can play any song from the collection. Click on ‘Start Server’ and you are ready to go.

At the client end, open your browser and type in the URL as ‘http://ip_address_of_server.’ By default, the server runs on port 80, which is the default port on which most Web servers run. If you have another Web server already running on port 80, you can change the port in the plug-in’s configuration. The Web page displayed is self-explanatory and you can even remotely close Winamp or shut down the machine. You can browse through the playlist and click on any of the track titles to play them remotely. 

Ashish Sharma