for those who listen to music @ work

[Ugzz]

anyone have/use/heard of the Winamp remote?

ive been using it for a few weeks and i love it!

you install the remote at home, (you need dsl or cable), then you run it @ home and give it a username and password.
then you go to work (or any other online location) and just download winamp, type in your username and password you set at home and bam that it. You now get full access to your entire music collection at home, folders, files, playlists etc. and you can just play them all from the remote location. Its like taking your whole music library with you, which for me thats like 12k+ songs.. so yeah, pretty nice heh

It does videos also, but they take longer to buffer so you have to have a rather beefy net connection.

[babot]

I had used winamp remote plugin in the 20th century.. :D

However, at that time the quality of sound was not so good for both reasons: CPUs were too slow to do real-time encoding with higher quality and the network bandwidth wasn't good enough. However, as the sound card of my office computer sucks, I'd just use my iPod. Also.. I have networked storages at my home and office.. (stable 10Mbps at home and 1Gbps at office) so virtually, they are using the same hard drives. :)

Anyways, winamp remote is really great especially for people who can't afford other solutions.

[SWortham]

I haven't used the Winamp Remote. It would be convenient, but the better alternative in my situation is to physically bring my music collection with me. Initially I burned most of my MP3 collection on a DVD and then copied the MP3's to my work computer. That way I can play them locally and I don't use up precious office bandwidth. And now I have a Zune too which of course makes bringing my music collection with me even easier.

But I do use the Winamp player. I've always been a fan.

[evan938]

i dont think work would approve of me downloading anything, but we are the only department in the whole company (which is huge) that allows us to have an ipod. we have to have earphones not to disturb anyone

i think its a great idea, because for the most part, it keeps me working and not up talking to other people, which i tend to do quite a bit when i dont have music

im bummed they dont let us use the computer for online radio anymore. now i have to go drop 20$ on a piece for my ipod to listen to the local rock stations morning show

[SWortham]

im bummed they dont let us use the computer for online radio anymore. now i have to go drop 20$ on a piece for my ipod to listen to the local rock stations morning show
About half the people here were using those internet radio stations. When you have that many people listening to streaming music on a T1 connection, it slows things down. So of course we now have the same policy. Streaming music @ work = internet slowness.

[evan938]

makes sense

oh well, i just hope that i can get enough signal inside the building to get local radio and talk radio in the evenings

[SuperGLS]

No listening to music at work for me. That sounds pretty good though.

[Ugzz]

yeah winamp had a remote feature way back, but they sucked at it. Now its run by ORB. the coolest part is (And i didnt even know this when i posted initially) is you dont have to download winamp anymore. you just have to have internet access. its totally web bases. you just go to winamp.orb.com and puch in your user/pass and you get all yer stuff, so no more downloading needed :D

About half the people here were using those internet radio stations. When you have that many people listening to streaming music on a T1 connection, it slows things down. So of course we now have the same policy. Streaming music @ work = internet slowness.

T1 is so turd, the only reason t1 is/was popular is becasue you can upload as fast as you can download, but a t1 line is only 1.54 megabits per second. many cable lines these days are 4-8 megabits lol. Course with those your upload is only like 100kps, which is like .78 megabits, but whatever. thats totally worth it. and t1's a $$ anyway :P

i guess im pretty lucky working at CMU, we have a handfull of t3 lines and a number of t1s all being piped together. I can max out our wall outlets by downloading. The max on the 100MB switches is about 12Megabytes a second. not megabits, but megabytes. For those not familiar with the terms thats like 3-4 mp3's downloaded in 1 second. Or a full 700MB Data cd (or audio cd) in less then 60 seconds.

[SWortham]

T1 is so turd, the only reason t1 is/was popular is becasue you can upload as fast as you can download, but a t1 line is only 1.54 megabits per second. many cable lines these days are 4-8 megabits lol. Course with those your upload is only like 100kps, which is like .78 megabits, but whatever. thats totally worth it. and t1's a $$ anyway :P

i guess im pretty lucky working at CMU, we have a handfull of t3 lines and a number of t1s all being piped together. I can max out our wall outlets by downloading. The max on the 100MB switches is about 12Megabytes a second. not megabits, but megabytes. For those not familiar with the terms thats like 3-4 mp3's downloaded in 1 second. Or a full 700MB Data cd (or audio cd) in less then 60 seconds.
True. Business connections in general are overpriced. Business DSL and T1's are the worst considering there are some home connections out there (Verizon FiOS, Cable Modem services, etc) that will give you higher upload & download speeds than a T1 for a fraction of the price. The cable modem service I have at home does 8 Mb/s down and 1 Mb/s up. That's not quite as fast as a T1 on the upload side, but there are others that are faster.

But ISP's are good at marketing their business connections to businesses. And I think most ISP's won't even offer their "home" internet connection to a company in a small office. They know that businesses have more money to burn than home owners so they take full advantage.

The solution:
Start a business out of your own home, and buy a top-of-the-line Verizon FiOS home connection (15 mb/s up & down, 10X the speed of a T1 for $65 a month) as well as home DSL. Then pipe the two together on a server with dual NICs for load balancing and redundancy. One comes through fiber (FiOS), the other over the phone line (DSL). That way, if one goes down you'll experience no interruption of service as you'll still have the other. Then you'll have a mega-home-connection that's more reliable than a single T1, more than 10X faster, and costs $400+ less per month. :) As you can probably guess, I've toyed with the idea of doing this myself.

Man... that was off topic.