Streaming MP3s from tape

[Randy Rathbun]

First, thanks to Jeffrey for his suggestion. I did some playing around with tar
last night by writing some MP3s to a tar file on my hard drive. Then I tried to
play it. XMMS would not do anything with the file, but mpg123 played it with no
problem. There is a hitch, however - mpg123 does not deal with variable bit
rate mp3s! Ack! 

I did it by doing mpg123 filename.tar. simple, I know. But that is how it
worked. 

So, then I did this:
tar -c filenames*.mp3 /dev/nst0
mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind
mpg123 /dev/nst0

Well, asside from a problem that it stops the audio while it reads from the
tape, it works! Still some things to play with, but it does work.

Randy

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Tony Hammitt blabbed:
> Nope, forget that...  According to freshmeat.net, there is no mp3
> player that can take streaming data.  This _is_ open source, though.
> I don't think it could be that hard to write a patch for some software
> to play from stdin instead of a file stream.  It may have to read in
> the entire file to decode it properly, but as long as it then blocked
> stdin until the file was done playing, you could use the 'tar' approach.