It'a been a long road getting to this point. After dozens of code refactors, exhaustive editing, and several people working tirelessly for the last few months in their free time I am proud to finally be able to announce that we have reached a stage in development where things are stable enough to put out a release candidate. There are a mountain of fixes and new features which you can read about here and here. Probably the most exciting thing we have done in a while is our new Desktop Edition, which is available in x86 and x64 releases. The desktop edition doesn't require a server or any difficult IIS configuration procedures; you just have to run an installer like any other application.

We're super excited about this release and I hope all of you check out the online demo (music playback is disabled as are the admin features) and let us know what you guys think!

I had some time this week to work on my labor of love, MP3-CMS. After hacking my iPod's firmware to run Rockbox, a free and open source hardware mp3 player user interface, I decided to develop a synchronization mechanism between handheld mp3 players and the MP3-CMS. This tiny script uses your exported "My_Star_Ratings.csv" file (from the Playlists section) to sync music file rated 3, 4, or 5 stars to your music player.

If using Rockbox

• Log into the MP3-CMS server and navigate to the Playlists section.
• Click the link, Export My Star Ratings (.CSV)

• Save the My_Star_Ratings.csv file to the root of your player
• Unzip the iPodSync.zip archive to the root of your player so your folder looks like the one below
• Run _sync.hta to start the application

• Click the Run Sync button to start the sync.

Non-Rockbox Players

For non-rockbox mp3 players, you can use any folder on your computer to sync to and then configure your player's software to watch the directory. This way, anytime you run a new sync using the script your player's software will automatically sync to the hardware player.

The script copies songs in the CMS to your local path where the tracks are rated 3-5 stars and it renames them in this format %ARTIST% - %ALBUM% - %TITLE%.mp3. If the album has a folder.jpg cover art file then it will be copied to \.rockbox\albumart\%ARTIST%-%ALBUM%.jpg

DOWNLOAD:  iPodSync.zip (75.38 kb)

Obviously I use the mp3-cms everyday and basically from the beginning it's been the same layout. The last few weeks the blog layout of the application has started to really bother me and I'd really like to add support for multiple themes. In the meantime though, I'm experimenting with different look and feels just to see how the system will handle various CSS templates. I'm having a little trouble getting some of our custom AJAX controls to render correctly in the non-default themes but progress is being made. You can see from the links below one of the themes I'm considering adding into the system. I'll probably end up dragging my feet on this unless I get some feedback regarding whether this is a good idea or not. 

• New Theme 01 
• New Theme 02
• New Theme 03

A couple of the developers for the mp3-cms project met up at HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) this past weekend and we had a fantastic time. I wanted to run the mp3-cms on the HOPE network and give everyone there a chance to use it but we didn't have the resources to transport a server up to New York City and I was concerned that there might be some kind of copyright violation if I arrived in tow with a 100GB music collection running through our CMS available to everyone at the conference. We met several LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP) developers at the conference who expressed keen interest in looking into our project so perhaps that will get us a little closer to a Linux capable version. 

The HOPE conference was great but I couldn't help but feeling that the vast majority of attendees were mere groupies or Law Enforcement as oppossed to real hackers. The MAKE, NYCResistor, and HacDC teams had impressive showings all weekend. For me personally my highlights were the Social Engineering, PenTesting with LiveCDs, Mitnik keynote, WikiScanner, and Laslow talks. 

Here are some photos I took at the conference 

Creating installation documentation is always a complete nightmare. In the past I've used various editors such as HtmlHelp and FastHelp to generate pretty CHM style help files for appliations. In the last few years I've come to see how valueable a wiki can be for this. Instead of spending hours creating documentation you can let your users who are passionate about your product assist in this documentation by using a wiki.

I have stood up a rudimentary wiki for my MP3-CMS music server project.