You find yourself in a room.  You look down and find a musty sheet of paper with some poorly scrawled notes on it...

• Status — When will it be done?!
• Information — What does it do? What's the Background?
• Frequently Asked Questions — We've always hated the RTFS approach.

Status

• When will it be released?
  We're working to release a packaged version of Audio Enclave by the mid-February, 2006. We're behind by a few weeks due to the fact that most of our team was participating in the MIT MASLab CompetitionCurrently, our implementation of Audio Enclave has a lot of custom tailoring, innappropriate user mocking, and other details we need to clean up before it can be put on SourceForge. Additionally, right now there is no installer for Audio Enclave, we simply live-update out of our repository.
• Does it work?
  Oh yea! Audio Enclave is listed as Alpha in SourceForge because we have all core functionality working in a live environment used everyday by 35 people. Over January we'll be implementing the last two features we want in Audio Enclave: User Playlists, and support for multiple channels. We hate looking at projects and not knowing where they are, when they'll be done, or if they're even alive — so feel free to email any of our project admins with questions.

Information

• What does it do?
  Here at Pi Tau Zeta, we have Audio Enclave running with speakers in both of our lounges and three bathrooms. Shower music has never been so good. The whole of idea of Audio Enclave is very simple- think of it as those old school jukeboxes, but stuffed inside a linux server. Instead of LPs, we used and a database. Instead of punching buttons and banging at a glass window, people bring up a webpage and search for the music they want to play. Basically, so far we've only found music players that are geared to one omnipotent user, instead of a community. So we decided to change that.
• What it's good for:
  Communities- be it a dorm hall, house, or office. Somewhere where different people all listen to the same music.
  A centralized music library.
  Playing different music on different speakers, but having one place to control it all. A popular feature when we throw parties.
• What it's bad for:
  Filesharing. This is non a file sharing service, like Napster, i2Hub, or BitTorrent. It's meant for a community to pool their music collections together, not replicate
  Just one person. In this case, use iTunes, or a Linux equivalent. There are far better and easier music players geared to the individual.
  Windows Servers
  Novice Users: Getting audio to work in Linux is a pain, and unless you're comfortable working with working beyond the command shell (ie, do you know what ALSA is?), we'd recommend saving yourself a week of sorrow and moving onto something else..
• Background
  Audio Enclave has been serving the brothers and sisters of Pi Tau Zeta, a hall at MIT, since 1998. The old version of Audio Enclave, while functional and pretty hot to begin with, had a number of problems.  It was buggy, insecure, and messily coded, which made it hard to maintain.  In the original version, the system was a combination of C, Perl, shell scripts, and duct-tape.  The fact that it worked > 50% of the time is a testament to the skillz of the creator, Benoc, and maintainer, qmahoney. Sometime around the tail end of 2004, a few of us decided it was time to rewrite it from scratch, and over the following months, we did so.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Who do I email with questions?
  Feel free to write to our developers on the SourceForge page. They're college students though, so don't expect a quick response.
• What language is Audio Enclave coded in?
  The backend and CGI scripts are 100% Python (no elitism here).  The HTML frontend has been spruced up with CSS, JavaScript, Java, XML, AJAX, and other interwebby things in order to make it more interesting.  The Python backend is also linked to several standard Linux components, including a MySQL database and the XMMS2 music player.