JukeANator Digital Jukebox

[fctdm02]

I've spent the last several  years working on a digital jukebox application that  I think  is easy-to-use and has an elegant user interface.  I'm calling it the  "JukeANator" Digital Jukebox:

     http://www.jukeanator.com

It  is touch screen friendly and can be used in a bar, by DJs, or by the home user.  When used in a bar, JukeANator can be connected to a Mars AE2600 bill acceptor and has support for infrared remote control plugins.  Coming soon, will be a web-based interface so that you can run JukeANator from your MAME machine and remote control it from another computer.

It started as a front-end to Winamp (there is a small  plugin DLL that I wrote that drives Winamp), but I've also adapted the software to drive both Windows Media Player and QuickTime, in order to handle protected format MP3s from the online digital music stores.

I've Java Webstart enabled the application, so it can be installed automatically from the web, and if you don't have Java on your machine, a Java Runtime Environment can also be installed for you. 



regards,
Tom Myers

[Lilwolf]

I LOVE the browser based test... VERY COOL AND VERY PROFESSIONAL!

How customizable is it? 

Will it run at 640x480?

It doesn't seem to work with a keyboard.  Would it work with a joystick and 4 buttons?

I like the admin settings, but I would like to setup something like this with 5 buttons (or so).   Think kids... I want my 5 year old to be able to select her area, then see all her songs... Then pick her favorite album or favorite song..  NEXT I want to be able to clear all the songs or skip the current one (I need to be able to veto the kids bop when headaches kick in).

btw, what do you expect as a normal user?  I see having a professional price and a home price.  What do you see the difference between two home users?

Oh yeah... Do you have a CD ripper?

[fctdm02]

Lilwolf,

>How customizable is it?
 I guess that  depends upon what you mean by customizable. To jump ahead, adding keyboard mappings is something that I've contemplated, as now that I know how to hook up keyboard encoders (because of building my own MAME machine), having buttons ala jukeboxes may be cheaper than purchasing either a touch-screen or a touch-screen add-on.  I've also contemplated putting the password-protected feature of the admin screen into the professional , non-commercial version in order to accommodate those occasions when the home user wants to restrict access to the admin screen. 

>Will it run at 640x480?
I don't think it will look pretty at that resolution.  I have a friend with macular degeneration, so I added support for the everything to scale down nicely to 800x600 (including all the images and cover art).   

>It doesn't seem to work with a keyboard.  Would it work with a joystick and 4 buttons?
Since I originally developed it to be touch-screen friendly, there isn't very much keyboard support in there now.  However, since I also use it to run my music while at work 8 hours a day, sometimes I find myself  wanting to do things via the keyboard.

SO --- I think I could easily map any pushbutton action to an arbitrary key via a properties file.  For example, you could "customize" it so that the 'A' key would map to the "Previous Page" button on the "Main" page for example.  You could change it to be any key that would map to the "Previous Page", so I'm hoping that that's what you mean by customizable.  There is a fair amount of "Configuration" that you can do, as evidenced by the Admin screen...

>like the admin settings, but I would like to setup something like this with 5 buttons (or so).   
I assume you mean arcade buttons that you would be able to map to screen buttons with the keyboard being locked away in a cabinet or something like that.  Yes, given what I said above, you could do this. 

>Think kids... I want my 5 year old to be able to select her area, then see all her songs...
Her "area" could be a style of music.  See the style screen.  There is also a setting to prevent CDs with explicit lyrics from being played.

>NEXT I want to be able to clear all the songs or skip the current one (I need to be able to veto >the kids bop when headaches kick in).
There is limited support via a small java-based socket program that I wrote for coworkers to reject songs that were playing from JukeANator on my computer.  It is of the form: java Client  <hostname> REJECT_ALL

>Oh yeah... Do you have a CD ripper?
Yes, I use ExactAudioCopy!  I can't add any value to the CD Rippers out there, and unless I got a backer/buyer of this thing, there's nothing driving me to try to match applications like MusicMatch and RealJukebox feature for feature.  My goal was to have a great user interface for selecting music and modifying the contents of the song queue, not geting the music in there in the first place...

regards,
Tom Myers

I am also adding web-based remote control, but that is still in the early stages of development...




btw, what do you expect as a normal user?  I see having a professional price and a home price.  What do you see the difference between two home users?

[fctdm02]

>btw, what do you expect as a normal user?  I see having a professional price and a home price.  What do you see the difference between two home users?

See the "order" page on my website.  In my opinion, if this was for your kids, then the "Lite" feature would do for them with the assumption that I add in keyboard mapping support...

Tom