SOAP
(Shower Oriented Audio Player)

One of my favorite perks of being a CSH member was the version of SOAP that existed when I was a freshman. Sadly, that setup was actually very poor in design--both in software and hardware design. For Pete's sake, each amplifier was split between two bathrooms.

As time has passed that system has fallen into complete disarray and only the speakers remain. Nobody has been able to shower with tunes since late 2012.

Flash forward to a lonely weekend during December 2013, I found myself deciding to learn Node.js, and wanted to have a starter project to get me up to speed. It hit me pretty quickly that I should remake SOAP.

One of the main issues with the original SOAP was that to start audio you had to submit a URL to the projects web interface. During busy shower hours the time between checking to see if a shower was available and returning to one's room to select a song would often leave oneself shower-sniped. The shower would be taken while setting up SOAP. It was infuriating.

Another problem was that you could only specify a single song, and most desirable songs are shorter than most desirable showers. The first 5 minutes of a shower would be melodious and enjoyable, but any point beyond would be filled only with the lonely sound of water running down the drain.

These two shortcomings and the potential to fix them drove me through my Node.JS text, and on to create a working recreation of SOAP.

My solution focused around the plan to provide each bathroom with an independent client machine that would query a database of playlists--playlists edited through a centralized web server.

The client is quite tidy. It waits for user authentification, and upon receiving it, pulls the user's playlist from the database. That playlist is then poured into a worker thread that iterates through it and plays each.

The server is simple as well. It serves the content and features of a simplified webpage that includes--among other things--a text area which is used to display and edit the current user's playlist. When the text area is submitted it is parsed and stored into the database keyed to the user's id.

The database is Redis, configured to be more persistent than average, and stores each playlist simply a list.