Whole home audio and touchscreen juke installed

[orion]

Last night I completed a whole home audio system with a touch screen juke I built for him. I should start by saying that although this isn't a stand alone juke persay, it does represent a good example of a custom install of a touch screen juke and could provide some valuable information to folks out here on the fourm. I currently work for a major university in the area as a broadcast tech and have worked in the past as an A/V installer so to me and to most of you here this is a very simple and relatively cheap project.
Luckily the builder had already run the wiring when the home was built. He ran 4wire runs from a dedicated media closet to 4 rooms in the house to low voltage box locations and then 2, 2wire speaker runs to low voltage boxes in the ceilings. The hard work was basically done for me.
 I built him a PC out of junk parts I had laying around the house. The motherboard was an old bio star I had laying around with an AMD 1.6GHZ processor with only 500megs of ram. I had three 40 gig hard drives and a CD rom laying around as well as an old beat up case. I also had several old Sound Blaster 5.1 cards and an old ATI card with a VGA and analogue DVI outs. I was missing a power supply but a local PC shop gave me a 400w power supply for free. I loaded XP on one of the drives and the other two I expanded the partitions to create an 80gig partition (plenty of room for MP3's) I bought the full version of Album player with tunes remote and installed that for him. This will let him control album player from his phone and tablet computer from anywhere in the house (once I get his wifi issues sorted...cascading routers and repeaters ect..) Though the PC is junk it works great for this purpose. Like many of you, this is why I keep old computer junk around. I picked up an ELO touch screen on eBay for $60.00 and he purchased an amp and in ceiling speakers with impedance matching volume controls I picked out for him from Home Theater Direct. http://www.htd.com/Products/basic
The hardest part was installing the screen. Fireblocking and the placement of an electrical box for his doorbell and his thermostat limited where I could place the screen. Also for in wall placement of these screens the frameless versions are much better. There were none available on eBay so I had to make it work. The plastic bezel was too wide to get the 15 inch monitor to fit between the studs and with these elo touch models you can't remove it because it holds the digitizer in place. I wound up having to chisel out about 1/2 inch of the studs on both sides so the screen could recess into the wall. In the process of installing it I broke the digitizer due to the unevenness of the surface of the studs I had chiseled out when I went to screw it in. The glass shatterd into 100 pieces. We had to order another one and I decided to use the now digitizerless monitor in the closet so he could see what he is doing when he adds music, PC admin maintenance, ect. I was planning on using an old CRT for this anyway so this kind of worked out better in the long run anyway. I found a picture frame at Michaels that had a deep enough recess routed out on the back to fit over the monitor. i simply painted it black and attached it to the elo with some industrial strength velcro. Had a few minor issues with a low voltage box not being recessed into the wall deep enough for the volume knob, but over all it was a fairly simple install, using old PC parts (making it Eco friendly as well I suppose)  that gives lot of functionality and sounds damn good!

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[egosbar]

nice work , not sure how the remote goes with album player but if hes using a tablet i found the best option is logmein remote access to be best way to remote a juke , that way you have whatever is onscreen on the juke onscreen on the tablet

i use touchjams , ive used them all and found this one the best at least to my llking

i also skinned one that has only four albums per page makes them obviously look bigger and better i think

album player wasnt too bad but didnt think it matched up

[orion]

Thanks. Yeah I got logmein running as well, but its kinda laggy. Albumplayer can work with Apples tunes remote as well as a few Android apps. The disadvantage is you have to be logged into the same network to use it. Im also having problems on my Juke with certain artist tags being recognized in Albumplayer but not with tunes remote for some reason. Also I cant figure out how to get music purchased in itunes to tag correctly. I have Albumplayer pointed to where my itunes music is, have the plugins to play itunes purchaces in Album player, but I keep having to edit tags in media monkey. kinda a pain Im trying to solve at the moment.