I'm a web dev, working in a small studio with a couple of other devs and some crayon-munchers (or, "designers"). Like all the best and trendiest creative studios, we have tunes. Our tunes consists of a set of speakers that whoever wants to can plug into their machine, and DJ their little socks off via iTunes, Spotify, VLC or whatever their music player of choice happens to be.

Obviously, this lacks finesse. What we WANT is this: a single, dedicated machine running some sort of audio player (ideally Win-based, but a Linux flavour isn't impossible), that exposes an API. We (ie: me and the other devs) want to write a web-based client onto it, that'll let us remotely do all sorts of funky stuff like generating on-the-fly genre-based playlists, and voting for tracks, and making tea.

My question - and please forgive me if this isn't the place for such a question, I was going to ask on Stackoverflow but that didn't seem right either - is this: what's the best player to start with? What can do all of this? I know VLC can function as a streaming server, but know nothing of any API it may have. I'd rather chop my pinky off than use iTunes, but if it does what we want, then...

Anyhow, thanks for reading. All comments and suggestions gratefully received.