The Jukebox
I am falling way behind in documenting the Jukebox project. By the way, I’m building a Jukebox.
The idea for and design of the jukebox were found in the same place. The Rock Bottom Brewery in Chicago. Although I had used “internet” jukeboxes in the past the inspiration didn’t hit me until that night. Half the songs we wanted to play weren’t on the machine and needed to be downloaded at a cost of twice the normal price. That’s BS I thought, I can do it better. Did I mention we were in a brewery? Anyway, beer plus getting ripped off added up to inspiration. Mmm beer, inspiring young minds since 1164. Onto construction.
I set Google on the hunt for jukebox designs and MAME cabinets. The results were promising, what I waned to do had been done before. The shell would be an old video game cabinet, purchased off of Craigs List from Steve in Long Island. (Thanks for helping tie the trunk closed Steve) The guts consisted of a 6 year old Pentium 3 and a touch screen monitor. I just purchased the monitor off of touchwindow.com. And whats hardware without software, the jukebox program is called NordBeat. From what I can tell a German guy makes it. The software is the closets thing I could find to a real bar jukebox.
As of now the cabinet, computer and software are in the house. The monitor was bought over the weekend. I opted for the cheapest shipping available, so it should be here sometime before x-mas. The software, as far as I can tell without the monitor, is configured. There are over 900 albums in there, each had to be tagged with the correct artist, album title and album cover. This place ain’t called Groan of Tedium for nothing. I’ll post again on this subject next time there is a change with the project. Photos can be found here.
