I’ve since found a handful of things that almost do what I want and are probably hackable to do what I want — the leading contenders are Jwz‘s gronk and Jon Ferguson’s Otto. Gronk has the right idea except Jwz organizes his mp3s a little differently than I do; Otto is a bit heavyweight but if I can lighten it up on the database side of things away we go.

It certainly works, and it’d be a hell of a lot less temperamental than just about anything else I can come up with.

AITP

               [switch ]
    +------+    |  |  |     +------+
    |nfs   +----+  |  +-----+ qube |
    |server|       |        |      |
    +------+    +--+---+    +------+
                |      |
                |laptop|
                +------+

MP3s are stored on the NFS server and decoded on the qube, and I want to control that whole affair via the laptop (or any other machine on the network that isn’t the NFS server or the qube).

Even if I had a Mac to run it on, I still think that’s a “files there, play here” solution, though — the mp3 will be decoded and output on the ethernet-accessible-only Qube, and I just need some way of telling the Qube what to play next.

lpr is still looking best. :-)

Nobody seems to understand why, in two years, given those constraints, only 4 courses were ever sold. In the courseware department, total income: ~$2,000, total expenses ~$4,000,000. So, yeah, we have a surplus of Qubes, some with big padded carrying cases. They are great for cvs, webservers, build servers, mail servers, and mp3 servers, but there is no way we could use all of them. Needless to say, that particular arm of the company has been amputated.