A better place to get into music – a better way to do that

The best thing that I noticed in my CE work life after its open work environment, is the media in the souls spread all over in this org. There are media freaks who likes to listen to muzic at high vol while working, watch videos and want to take digiphotographs when and wherever they like. This is the Gen M of this org. I myself have turned into one such soul after spending such a long time in this environment and I am enjoying it.

I wanted to talk about a unique app developed by the techies out here – The generic Winamp interface for all the n/w users.

The idea was generated few months ago. As Manas told me, the idea is the brain-child of Dhiraj – the most energetic (and perhaps most complicated) TL out here in CE. Ok, this is first time, I am mentioning Dhiraj here in blog, so let me write a brief about him as far as I know. There are interesting stories related to every techie here @ CE and Dhiraj is no exception to that. Here is what I got to know about him.

Dhiraj Singh Chauhan is from Uttranchal. He got selected into IIT, Kanpur for Mechanical branch in his first appearance in JEE. But after spending few weeks at IIT, he decided not to continue as he felt that this wasn’t the field for him. So he headed to Kota, of course, for Bansal Classes. After preparation of 1 year, again cracked JEE making it to Comp Sc @ IIT, Delhi. Perhaps the most daring story most of us at CE would have ever heard and so is referred to by Dhiraj as the most risky venture of his life. Of course there were many followers of same act from his home town, some made to it and many flunked. Anyway, after small affair (I call it tashan) at Germany, our engg manager called him to join CE, Delhi and since then, he is here, leading one of the brightest teams of CE. And he has implemented many good innovations in his project which are examples to his peers. Other than a good manager, he is a very humorous guy who never misses any chance to droll serious situations. His mates think that he has solution to every problem in project. So this is a small introduction to this big guy.

So I was talking about Winamp interface. It was started by Dhiraj after he brought brand new, powerful speakers of Altac Lancing ATP3 costing whooping bucks, for his team. He wanted everyone to have freedom of playing songs. And from there, started this play of creating the Common Winamp Interface (CWI). After adding the functionality to play songs in winamp located on a PC, the project was overtaken by Manas who added user interface to display songs in hierarchical structure on a webpage, ability to play the songs, enqueue the songs, Play/Pause the songs, Increase/Decrease/Mute the winamp volume – all provided in form of links. Right now, this project is in good shape without any bugs and everyone enjoys the songs. Anyone can play/enqueue the songs while sitting in one’s cube.

Why I m discussing about it? Because right now, I am working over this project to extend its functionality and versatility. So, thought of writing a brief overview before starting looking for Java APIs for extending the CWI. Winamp provides only C/C++ APIs and I am Java weenie. Will definitely update if developed something major…perhaps sometime!