Many of my mp3s are of such a high bitrate that they saturate my crappy 30k/s DSL connection. To solve that problem, I wrote a proxy that connects to the real shoutcast server and essentially pipes the output through lame before sending it to you. Doing this, I was able to easily down encode any mp3 output to something more reasonable for streaming, such as 64kbit.

If you want to take a look at it, it's only 38 lines of python.

lameproxy.py

This is probably going to become a part of Pimp itself. Instead of accessing the normal '/stream/happystream' you could do '/stream/happy?bitrate=128' and it will lame-it up for you. I've *always* wanted this feature in Pimp since version 2 (version 1 wasn't networked).

On a funnier note, it seems like the other media guys are catching on to "networked is good" - XMMS2 is being written from scratch so I hear. It's going to sport a client/server model. So far there's MPD2, XMMS2, and Gstreamer that are well known. Whatever, as far as I can tell they all have the library and player in the same place. Pimp abstracts it one more level: a control client, a server, and a media client. In this case, the control client is Firefox and media client is your favorite mp3 player. Those other projects will eventually catch up to me I suppose ;)