here's a screen shot of the X11 control panel module,
here's the same on the panel on the front of the hifi.
I didn't want an essay damm it - take me to the software...
In 1999 cheap motherboards which were poweful enough to the mpeg decoding and had on board sound and network cards came on the market. Chris and I had the idea to turn them into mpeg players. The resulting devices with software have some novel ideas and some uterly wacky ones.
At the base of the whole system is a very robust multiple transport unreliable datagram protocol. The protocol can be carried on just about any data stream, and has been implemented over Infrared, TCP/IP and a propreitry wireless transport. Each "unit" in the system has an address and can be sent commands from other units. Bridges between two or more transports are transparent and have intelligent forwarding algorythims to prevent loops. Thus suitably instructed I can point my remote at my hifi downstairs and tell my hifi upstairs to eject a CD.
The units that have been implemented so far are a System/Mixer unit, a CD player, an FM radio, a PCM record playback unit, an MPEG player, and two control units. All units can send and receive instructions, and it is the job of the control units to allow the user to choose which unit she wishes to address.
The MPEG unit uses a distributed filing system to fetch MPEG files from a wide variety of souces and an indexing system allows it to quickly seach through its library for particular tracks. It's smart enough not to play one movement of a work unless you ask it to. It's like Radio 3 used to be.