A Client-Server remote control system, with the server being remotely controlled. It was originally designed to control a music player on my "server" computer via global hotkeys.

The server runs and executes certain commands via the Java Robot class. The commands arrive via a standard Java Socket.

Currently only supports command that start with "music", but is relatively easy to extend.

The client is a launch-and-fire type, with a new Client instance being started for every command. This is purely because it made my setup easy to work with: I had separate scripts to launch a Client for each different command. The Client only receives a response when the server is monitoring or has to identify the current song. It uses Growl to notify the user via a popup when this happens.

Control

• monitor: Start monitoring for song changes (when new song starts playing, notification is sent back to client)
• stopmonitor: Stop monitoring for song changes

Playback

• start: Starts playback (or resumes from pause)
• stop: Stops playback (goes back to start of song)
• pause: Pauses playback (does not change position in song)
• restart: stop + start
• next: Skip to next song
• previous: Go back to previous song

Metadata

• identify: Gets song metadata (Artist, Title, Album, ...) and sends back to the client
• rate X: Gives the current song a rating of X