Re: lpr + mp3's (the hackathon mp3 spooling).

[Bob Beck <beck_(_at_)_bofh_(_dot_)_cns_(_dot_)_ualberta_(_dot_)_ca>]

>It never occurred to me to misuse lpr like this.  In a twisted
>way, I like it.  But for non-home use, *do* recall that this
>does copy over some rather large files into /var/spool/lpd/.
>Esp on the play machine.
>
>> I was reading that during c2k3 mp3's were played using lpr -Pmp3 so i been trying to replicate this on my home lan. This is what i stuck in my /etc/printcap

   Bleah! ok ok ok . for all you people who keep asking me, it's simple.

   edit the default /etc/printcap, uncomment the "lp" default printer line.
change lp to /dev/null, and add an if=/usr/local/bin/mp3if

   so you have:

lp|local line printer:\
       :lp=/dev/null:sd=/var/spool/lpd:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:if=/usr/local/bin/mp3if:

       
   Then in /usr/local/bin/mp3if do something like the following

--8<--
#!/bin/sh

cat > /some/where/big/enough/play.$$
mpg321 -q /some/where/big/enough/play.$$ > /dev/null 2>&1
rm -f /some/where/big/enough/play.$$
------

    Yes, you can tell mpg321 to read from stdin and not cat the file
somewhere. if you do, it messes up, I never bothered to figure out
why, got better things to do. Just like I had better things to do than
worry about if people spooled too many files, etc. We didn't look for
a technical solution to that. People who did dumb things with the
queue just got lprm'ed and abused.

    It only existed at c2k3 to give people a chance to spool their
own music. at home I'd never use it. I just use xmms with a big
playlist consisting of a metric buttload of mp3's nfs exported to my
home net, so it's rather silly to use for a jukebox.

    -Bob