This remote control applet is designed to be used with "Lansonic" Digital Audio Servers. The Lansonic DAS was a stereo component sold sometime around 2000-2003. The company's website appears to be gone, so I assume they are not manufactured anymore. This remote control sits in your windows system tray and let's you control the lansonic -- play, next, prev, etc, and see what song is currently playing.
So what is a Lansonic ?
Well, that would be this contraption:
It looks a little bit lame because the camera flash tends to wash out the details in the display (which is an ultra-cool looking blue LCD).
The Lansonic was one of the first digital audio server available for home use. You could buy it either with or without an internal hard drive. If you bought the hard drive version, then you could copy all of your MP3 (or WAV) files to it. If you bought the version without the hard drive, then you had to use it with an external file server, either windows or samba. It had analog and digital outputs for connection to your stereo, and you could remote control it through its ethernet port.
Personally, I bought the version without the hard drive, and stored all of my CDs on my fileserver (which conveniently had a raid array). Essentially you get something that looks and acts like a really big CD changer, but without having to swap CDs around. It was cool, and life was good!
So where can you buy one?
I don't think they make them anymore. The company website seems to be gone. You can occasionally find one on Ebay.
So why did I write this remote control application?
I wrote the remote control app because for whatever reason, the remote control applet built into the server stopped working. It was written in Java (a language which remains a mystery to a C programmer like me...). Since the company appears to be gone, I threw something together on my own so I could still remote control the thing.
Am I going to continue developing the remote control app?
If there was enough interest and if people were willing to pay me for my time (donations, shareware, something), or if I need more features for my own use, then probably. Otherwise, since the hardware is no longer being produced, I doubt I will be doing much more development.
