Remote Wonder for Controling MP3 lists in Various Rooms of the house?

[SirXcalibur]

Here's the question.
In a month I am moving to a new house (my first actually, woohoo!), and one thof the things I want to do (my wife actually ) is beable to control mp3 playing from anywhere in the house. Or at least from the living room.
So say I have my computer conecting to an input on the reciever. How far could that computer be from the living room in order for it to work? Would I be able to use winamp?

 

[NiDan]

yeah you can control winamp.. you need a plugin, i posted it in the AIW forum and it's also posted in this forum. in order for it to work winamp must be the app in focus (even the playlist can't be in focus, it must be the actual player portion of the program)

the plugin is kind of a stop-gap solution. the best possible scenario would be to somehow configure the remote software to search for winamp no matter what program has focus and send the command to it.
i don't see this ever happening (although the game black&white had a plugin which would call winamp through the b&w interface, maybe that can be adapted)

you can get pretty good range on the remote, it all depends on how big of a house are you talking, a 34 room mansion might have a "few" more dead zones than a small 10 room house.
my house is pretty small and i can use the remote from pretty much everywhere, couple of places i still have yet to try.


(wow, that's a long post... just long-winded today i guess)

 

[SirXcalibur]

Well my house will be only a story and a half, so hopefully I won't have to much trouble with this? Is there anyway to increase the range if I do?

As far as winamp, i read about the plugin and I am hopefully that some future software from Ati might help with that too. I won't be running the songs from my main computer either, I probably will be running it off of a 2nd computer who's sole purpose is to serve mp3's to the house which it will get off a 3rd pc I will run off a server in my basement.

So should I be looking at the Remote wonder for this, or some other product?

 

[NiDan]

as long as winamp is the application in focus and you have loaded the playlist by hand, you will have basic functionality (play, pause, stop, next track, previous track) volume will work because it alters the windows main audio volume level.
that's it... you won't be able change the "shuffle" command or the "repeat" command.

story and a half house, you'll be fine... as long as the walls aren't lined with lead... heh

 

[Stephen Orr]

Clearly things have changed today. There is now an official WinAmp plug-in and it works much better than what was suggested earlier in this thread, also the plug-in is open source so you can modify it to get around the "in focus" issue.

Careful however, do that wrong and the plug-in stops working for anything else. My developer believes there is one line of code you need to comment out to get around the in focus question.

Stephen

 

[SirXcalibur]

Thanks stephen, I wasn't that worried about the winamp thing anyway .

I think the computer that would be running the winamp stuff would be a stand alone dedicated to do that anyway. So the focus would be on winamp all the time anyway.