Thursday, 11 October 2012 00:00

Empathy Jukebox

Empathy Jukebox - a touchscreen ready virtual CD jukebox.

Introduction

Originally started more than 12 years ago as a simple media player to play albums in MP3 format, the project has been a constant side project for most of that time and has now evolved into a full touch screen capable skinable (with some effort) album centric jukebox system. I've used it to power standalone jukeboxes for some years. As the code is getting a bit dusty I've cleaned it all up a bit and you can get the source code here (Borland Delphi) or the download windows binaries here.

Main Features:-

  • Fullscreen touchscreen ready jukebox GUI.
  • Automatic CD extraction with  track/artwork finder.
  • Freetext searchable.
  • Alphabetical album jump.
  • Cover view album selection
  • Background music playmode.
  • Numeric keypad entry for the really old-school user.
  • 3D spinning CD view.
  • Playlist organiser.
  • Random playlist.
  • Touchscreen album editor.
  • Lockable controls for public use.
  • Fullscreen artwork view.
  • Windows GUI desktop mode player.
  • Free and Open Source.

 

Album Based Browsing

Taking an album centric approach to storing and accessing music, CDs are stored in MP3 format with one a folder representing a single album.

Each folder in the music collection is composed of the artist name followed by two underscores (__) and the title of the album. e.g. Jimi Hendrix Experience__Electric Ladyland

For optimal operation files are stored in album order, with the filenames arranged to reflect the order of the CD eg. track01.mp3, track02.mp3, track03.mp3 etc. A file 'title.dat' should also be present in the folder which is a simple text file with the corresponding track names, one per line. Another file 'title.jpg' contains a JPEG image of the album cover. 

A full CD -> MP3 ripper is included in the interface, which will query CDDB databases for track listings and Amazon for album artwork and then extract the CD to a correctly named directory with in the proper format.

Although this seems a little long winded, this system facilitates storing the CDs in the correct file order along with the album artwork, thus reproducing the CD experience fairly precisely.

The minimum requirement for the file system is that the folders are created in the artistname__albumtitle format. In this case the software will take track titles from the filenames in the order in which they appear in the directory.

If you haven't already decided that sounds far too much like hard work, you may want to download it or view some screen shots. iTunes it aint.

Update: October 2015
A new version is out. This relaxes the need to order the music so rigorously. The software will now attempt to scan through any folders it encounters and take a best guess at track title and order. The old system still functions. Also will now play back FLAC if the codec is installed (and a small registry patch is applied). Some additional codecs are supported.

Read 247215 times Last modified on Wednesday, 28 December 2022 22:10

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