MP3 Jukebox in my living room?

October 6, 2007 9:12 PM

Does anyone have suggestions for turning a giant TV and stereo into a cover-art browsable jukebox with interactive playlisting? I basically want a giant video ipod in my living room with "on the go" playlisting.

Ok, so I have a big party at the end of the month, and I just finished obsessing over my digital music collection. Everything now has cover art. What I'd like to be able to do, is have my tv (already connected to my stereo) display cover art for the currently playing track, as well as provide an interface with which people can arrange the currently playing playlist.

I looked into AppleTV, and it doesn't seem to handle the interactive part. Basically, I have wifi and ethernet to the liiving room. I have a server with the music exported via nfs. All the artwork should be embedded in the files themselves.

I'm a software engineer and the server runs gentoo linux, so I'm comfortable with really involved stuff. I'm also willing to spend some cash for a more elegant solution, as this will get a lot of use post party.

posted by butterstick to technology (20 comments total)

Forgot to mention that I also have a Wii, so something like Zinia run on apache could be an option. I believe the embedded opera streams mp3 ok, but not so sure about the album art.
posted by butterstick at 9:21 PM on October 6, 2007

I have done something similar with the following set-up:

1. Computer w/ s-video out into TV
2. Run iTunes fullscreen on TV monitor
3. Gyration gyromouse for controls

It's not elegant, but it is simple.
posted by Rock Steady at 9:40 PM on October 6, 2007

Not sure how much you want to spend, but the coolest way would be to use a Mac output to the TV. Use the little remote to run Front Row. Cover art shows up as the song plays.

Or, download the freestanding version of CoverFlow here. You have to operate it from the Mac mouse or keyboard, but it's way cool.

(Yes, I know this doesn't make the best use of your server situation, but it's cool an interactive.)
posted by The Deej at 10:56 PM on October 6, 2007

I think the important thing here is the 're-arranging playlists on the fly', so Front Row is out.
posted by empath at 11:19 PM on October 6, 2007

What about Jinzora?
posted by empath at 11:24 PM on October 6, 2007

Front Row is not out. It shows your playlists, and you can of course create a playlist from within iTunes at will.

CoverFlow may be out for that purpose though.
posted by The Deej at 11:30 PM on October 6, 2007

I do this with SageTV. It's a pretty nice solution for me since it takes care of the TV also. I would look into one of the HTPC programs.

Or if you don't like Jinzora, Ampache is similar.

Or you could do something with FooBar which is what I used to run.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 5:19 AM on October 7, 2007

Have a look at SlimServer, which I think meets most of your needs. If you dig around on their forums, somebody has posted an ebuild for the software, so getting it on your Gentoo box shouldn't be a problem.
posted by genehack at 6:25 AM on October 7, 2007

Thanks for the ideas everyone. Right now I'm leaning toward just plugging my laptop in, mounting the iTunes library via NFS, pluging the video into the TV and using Kiiboard to re-purpose the wiimote as a mouse pointer.

Anyone see any pitfalls with this?
posted by butterstick at 7:54 AM on October 7, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Like problems running cover flow with 1000ish albums over NFS? I'm kinda new to cover flow.
posted by butterstick at 8:05 AM on October 7, 2007

Can I be the millionth to recommend Xbox Media Center? It does everything you're asking for and much, much more.
posted by bdk3clash at 1:31 PM on October 7, 2007

Xbox media center definitely looks cool. Here's a link to "install in 30 minutes."

Think I might do this with my "extra" xBox which got kicked out of the living room by the xbox 360.
posted by The Deej at 5:49 PM on October 7, 2007

What about hooking up your computer to the TV, then using the Wiimote to control the computer?
posted by robcorr at 12:45 AM on October 8, 2007

(Well, that'll teach me for rushing to post without reading the thread...)
posted by robcorr at 12:46 AM on October 8, 2007

(Also, I'm keen to hear how it works.)
posted by robcorr at 12:50 AM on October 8, 2007

Ok, so cover flow with almost a thousand images got A LOT faster when I ran it on a machine with 2G ram instead of 768MB, and this was despite mounting NFS over a wifi connection.

I'll look into the Xbox home media thing, but I don't have one lying around to leverage.
posted by butterstick at 10:30 AM on October 8, 2007

The FP-100 Does all of those things. If you're willing to spring for the $600.
posted by Mr. Ugh at 12:27 PM on October 8, 2007

Ok, so I tried out just using iTunes with CoverFlow and the wiimote via kiiboard, and I'm not sure if that's gonna be simple enough for drunks to just pick up and use. An apple interface is really designed for some fine control; everything is pretty small. And the clicks tend not to register if you move the mouse between mousedown and mouseup. That makes the handheld wiimote really hard to use, because it's way too precise. I'd also have to hack some gestures into the software to emulate mouse scrolling.

Honestly though, I think the real deal breaker is CoverFlow itself. When you have it in full screen mode, it's pretty useless. You can flip through the albums, but you can't flip them over, select a track and add it to the PartyShuffle. Can you? I seem to remember seeing iPods that can do that, I don't understand why iTunes cover flow is so different.

Also, this whole setup necessitates my keeping my macbook open and exposed around drunks with drinks. Both my life and career are in that thing. I'd probably need to put it behind glass for the night.

My current verdict is it kinda sort works, but i'll be playing with it more.
posted by butterstick at 3:54 PM on October 8, 2007

Ok, so i've decided to roll my own jukebox and use the wii/Opera with embedded flash for the music player. This weekend I managed to get the contents of the iTunes Library.xml into MySQL with actual relationships, as opposed to the flat dictionary that Apple has in the xml file. Now I'm writing up a basic web interface using ajax.

I should have a functional Alpha by weeks end.
posted by butterstick at 11:11 AM on October 15, 2007

So, the whole reason for this was a party I had this weekend. The Jukebox was a success, but not the way I imagined it.

Turns out, that most freely available Flash mp3 players are driven by javascript hooks that were not available in the Flash engine until version 8. The Wii's player is version 7, so the Ajax frontend was pretty much useless.

My next attempt was writing something simple using opensource Flash development tools since I can't afford a copy of Adobe Flash CS. While promising, I could never get the sound engine to function with a remote resource, so loading mp3 via their URL was out. That's another dealbreaker.

So with my Wii audio options exhausted, I looked at a turnkey solution. I settled on the Roku Soundbridge, which includes a published control protocol specification. Unfortunately, it's a real pain to navigate a 10K song library with a 2 line LCD interface. I salvaged part of the Ajax frontend and wrote a servlet tier which maintained the TCP connections needed to drive the Soundbridge.

It worked pretty well, the only gripe I have with it is there is no good way to get to the album artwork. It's pretty kludgy right now and misses about 20% of the art due to incorrect assumptions about directory paths.
posted by butterstick at 2:03 PM on October 30, 2007