Yet Another MP3 Jukebox
Updated! 16/11/2001 - See Below.
Jukebox Mockup
Photoshop mockup for MP3 Jukebox software.
Larger Version
It's using Windows 98, DirectDraw, and XAudio for the MP3 handling. It's been a while since I wrote any Windows software so it's taking a while, but I'm getting something useful now. I have a couple of hundred scanned CD covers, out of about 600 CDs currently ripped (still plenty to go), which you can use to browse for tracks. There is a perl program on the server that does a lot of donkey-work in finding the tracks, their run-times and cleaning up the filenames a bit for display - this saved me writing a bunch of text-handling in C, and also doing lots of directory-searches and file reads over an SMB connection, which sucks.
Likewise, it uses a fair chunk of RAM to cache the JPEG because it seems to take an age to read them in sometimes. As a lucky coincidence, it seems that the image size I am using (300x300) is almost exactly what Amazon use for their large cover pictures, and I can usually find images there quicker than I can scan them on my poor little USB scanner.
The main downside right now is the noise of the PC - it'd be nice to find something that was fanless, diskless, networked and still had sufficient oomph to deal with the graphics. Something like a Corel Netwinder would be cool, if it wasn't for the price.
Howie Jan 22nd 2001
Update - 16th November 2001
Jukebox Client
First cut of the Jukebox client
Larger Version
Jukebox Server
The Jukebox FreeBSD server
Larger Version
The MD5 isn't used yet, but my intention was to write a tool to rename the files based on their MD5 hashes. I have all the data backed up onto many CDRs, and a lot of the tracks have been renamed since they were burned. To avoid losing that renaming effort, I wanted a tool to recognise the tracks by their content (MD5 hash being an approximation), and rename them accorsing to a master list. That way, next time I have a disk crash, I don't lose the nice renamed files (last time, I did).
The jukebox software itself hasn't changed a whole lot since I first wrote this article, because I haven't had a lot of time to spend on it. It's next on the list!
Also, I heard from Latka, about this set-top box, which looks like a promising hardware platform for the next jukebox. Silent!