Announcing Beatstream

I like to take on side-projects and here is one of my latest ones: Beatstream. The idea was to stream my own music over the Web from my home computer to my work computer—or any other place with a Web browser! During a three month span Beatstream has developed into a nice little music player I use daily—and others do, too. To use it, you install it on a computer and access it via the Web browser. See the demo! (Chrome works best, Firefox works sometimes)

I’ve put up some free music from some of my friends for you to listen to. The UI should be self-explanatory. If you’re having any trouble, drop me a line via twitter or email.

Current feature list:

• “All music” -playlist
• Filter/search
• Standard playback controls (play/pause, next, prev)
• Seeking
• Volume control
• Shuffle and Repeat
• Last.fm scrobbling!

The technology stack behind Beatstream is Ruby on Rails, jQuery, SlickGrid, jQuery UI and SoundManager 2. In hindsight, I should have tried out something like KnockoutJS or Spine for this project. But the fact is that I needed to have a working version of the product up as soon as possible. I just started coding and got the thing playing some music! Later I polished the UI a bit and changed from my initial implementation of HTML5

I also wanted to give Ruby on Rails a try instead of the usual PHP. Node.js is unarguably the FOTM, but I still hadn’t tried Rails properly, so I went with Rails. Rails handles the music indexing, playlist JSON generation, streams the songs to SoundManager 2 and relays the last.fm commands. Easy-beasy!

This project has been a smashing success in my books and I’m really proud of the player. Next I’m gonna flatten out some UI / usability bugs, refactor the code, maybe pick-up one of the aforementioned MVC libraries, and after that create the playlist functionality.

If you’re interested, you can check the source code on Github. If you try the app and like it, you can buy me a beer:

PS. A proper showcase page is coming up later on beatstream.fi