Dot Tunes
Being the aspiring man-of-leisure that I am, when the PS3 was released almost year ago, I just had to have one. I’ve been meaning to review the PS3 for some time, but unfortunately haven”t really spent much time with it. Little things like my job & my family keep getting in the way. I’ll get to that eventually, but since I’ve finally been able to get one of the PS3’s more interesting features, it’’s media server capabilities, to (sort of) work, I thought I”d write about that.
The PS3 can act as a media server client, allowing you to stream audio & video from a computer to your PS3 and thus into you home entertainment center. I’ve got a pretty big iTunes library (nearly 600 albums), and so streaming my iTunes library to the stereo in my family room is something I’ve wanted to do for sometime. Unfortunately, the proprietary format that Apple has chosen to use for iTunes has stymied most of my previous attempts. This is undoubtedly a critical part of Apple’s master plan and not a simple “if you want it done right, do it yourself” thing. One more thing to blog about when I get the chance. Anyway, back on point, I’ve finally found an app that’’s allowing me to stream my iTunes library to my PS3 – it’s called Dot.Tunes.
Unfortunately, Dot Tunes doesn’t really use the PS3’s media-server features, but instead relies on the PS3’s web browsing capabilities to deliver a music playing flash client. The client is functional, if somewhat annoying – you can”t browse your music, only search for artists, albums, and playlists. Once you find an artist, album, or playlist you can browse the songs in that list and play one or all. So why not just create a single playlist with all your songs in it you ask… Yea, problem is that Dot Tunes seems to not like very large playlists. It doesn’t crash or anything, it just won’t “publish” them, meaning that you can’t get to them with the client.
The Dot Tunes server is free. All the interesting plugins, including the PS3 plugin, cost a little – $10 I think. Getting the server up was time consuming and required me to open up a slew of ports in my firewall, but after a few hours of tinkering, it works with the exception of large playlists. The server has a small footprint when no one is using it, only taking up 3M of memory. But it’s a pig when users hit it – memory usage climbs with the size of the selected playlist. For instance, a 133 song list jacked the memory footprint to 206MB. Hmmm, maybe this is why large playlists won’t load. Another pain is that you have to reimport your library and then publish all the songs every time you restart the server. Even with all its warts, Dot Tunes is the only software I’ve found that”ll get the job done, so I’m happy to have it.
Dot Tunes has many other features, including the ability to stream music over the internet and to publish playlists as podcasts or RSS feeds. The web interface is much more usable than the PS3 flasah client, providing full search and browse features. It’s not half-bad for these uses. If Siteground allows it, maybe I’ll put a music server up here one day.
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