tjameswhite.com

We had our annual Tacky Basement Party over the weekend and I found DigitalDroplet.net just in time. They have a beta version of AudioFaucet available and it turns your Tivo into an iTunes extension.

My networked Tivo has the ability to stream music from the computer, but it doesn’t have any playlist controls. It simply sees all of the music in the folders you point out to it. It does allow you to shuffle the music in those folders, but it’s pretty rudimentary. So, I was in the process of creating a playlist in iTunes and then copying all of that music (10 hours worth) into a separate folder for the party. Then I found AudioFaucet.

AudioFaucet does exactly what I wanted: it looks at you iTunes XML file for the playlists you’ve created, streams the music to your home theater and displays the current track information on the screen, along with the album art and upcoming song. I should note, I don’t have any album art here, AudioFaucet ran off to Amazon.com for each song as it started.

The result was perfect. (And I scored major geek points with my geek friends.) The only minor quibble I have is that for some reason AudioFaucet skipped a few songs. For example, it didn’t play any of the Motown or Sinatra that was in the mix. The skipped songs didn’t interrupt anything, the software just kept going to the next song, I just don’t know why it skipped them. I put it off to being a beta release.

Hosting the party and running the bar, it was nice to not worry about changing CDs or making sure everything was up and running. It just played all night. While it might not have been spot-on-perfect, it was close enough that I didn’t have to care. Kudos DigitalDroplet. I see why you won the TiVo Developer Challange Grand Prize.