NetDJ is basically a netradio or an MP3 IceCast-streamer. The difference between other projects is that is a communitity-based solution. The idea is that NetDJ is used in f.x. an office environment: Everybody listens to NetDJ, and everybody can add songs to the playlist and eventually skip songs.
NetDJ can be used with your favorite MP3-player like XMMS, WinAMP, mplayer, Noatun, etc.
NetDJ started in ultimo 2000 as a virtual DJ that played random music fetched through the Gnutella-network, preferably with the 'gnut' Gnutella-client.
The music was not totally random though, since songs would only be fetched if other people on the network searched for them. So the playlist would reflect the current hits and seasons (Christmas, etc.). Personally, December and a bit of January included a lot of Christmas-hits, and right after the release of Apocalypse Now Redux a couple of Wagner operas "cruised by".
It was an interesting idea to explore, but not entirely legal. So Gnutella-support was disabled and instead it evolved into its current state where it is a community-based netradio.
NetDJ is a daemon that is controlled via its internal webserver, that serves both HTML and XML and accepts commands. So you can remotly control it through a browser or through the included Gnome applet.
An example of the HTML-output served directly by NetDJ or spiffed up a bit through PHP.
Well, NetDJ was started in the end of 2000 and has been working fine for me ever since. The "NetDJ engine" has not evolved a lot since (more than three years as of now), but the surrounding software supporting it has evolved. My installation includes:
November 2004: I've started hacking on NetDJ again. A complete rewrite based on Qt is on the way. I will also include database support for better searching and statistics support. Reencoding and OGG support is also planned for.
It is working for me, but is not entirely easy to install. You need to get IceCast up and running, fiddle with some configuration files, etc. Compilation also needs a couple of support libraries that you may not have, etc. So all in all: It works, and you can play around with it, but you may be challenged. But feel free to contact me if you need help!
For source code and such please visit the SourceForge homepage.
Last updated: 2004-06-12