Last night while hanging out with Chris we started talking about Honey Ryder, and streaming music from her.

Honey is the linux box that lives with Chris. She's been around in some form or another for 7 years now. Chris, myself, and a select few can stream music from her library of 20,000+ Mp3s. As she has been doing this for many years now we have learned it's pretty much just one user at a time and sometimes even that is too much as the the upload limitation can prevent a high bit rate mp3 from streaming properly. While these problems are much better now than they were even just a couple years ago because of network upgrades made by Chris' ISP.

Chris and I had both bumped into network limitiations just yesterday with honey. We were both attempting to stream music so it got jittery and crapy. Then he mentioned it happens some other times to him. So he asked if we could somehow turn the bitrate down just for streaming. Frist I wasn't sure if it was possible but I said I'd look into it.

So this morning between helpdesk calls I found MP3DownSampler on freshmeat.net and got it installed and going in less than 10 min after finding it. It works and it works pretty well. I managed to stream 3 diffrent mp3s from 3 diffrent boxes on two diffrent networks with no problems.