pimp, lame, ssh, and streaming!
#tags pimp,shell,networking,ssh tricks

So since pimp has a cheap shoutcast server thing, I decided to use that to play
music while I'm at home.<p>

Playing normal mp3s uses too much bandwidth to waste on my DSL connection
(~20-30k/s with 128-160kbit mp3s). So, I decided to use lame as a middleman to
down-encode the shoutcasted output from pimp. The following is a little script
that uses netcat to connect to the shoutcasty thing aswell as act as a server
elsewhere for the down-encoded mp3 data to be sent off. 

<p>
<pre>
#!/usr/local/bin/ksh

foo() {
	killall nc
	exit 1
}  

trap foo int 
nc -lp 8081 |&

echo "ICY 200 OK" >&p
echo >&p

nc whack 8080 | lame --mp3input -b 64 - - >&p
</pre>
<br>
I probably don't need to use co-processes, but they're fun, so whatever. Run
this script then run mplayer against whatever machine it's on. So what I do is, run the script, then mplayer:
<p>
<pre>
whack(~) > ./projects/pimp/pimp &
whack(~) > ./mp3foo
... over on my laptop ...
nightfall(~) > mplayer http://whack:8081

</pre>
<br>
Poof! Instant mp3 shenanigans.
Instead of averaging 24K/s I average 7.5K/s while playing streamed mp3s -
what's better is I can still control what song is being played throug pimp's
telnet interface and I don't have to waste time downloading every individual
song I want to listen to.


<p>
Furthermore, here's a nice oneliner to do inbound(download) bandwidth monitoring:
<p>
<pre>
netstat -w 1 | perl -e 'while (<>) { next unless m/^\s+\S+\s+\S+\s+(\d+)/; \
	$b++; $a += $1; print "Total/Avg/Cur = $a / " . ($a / $b) . " / $1\n"; }'
</pre>