cei's Journal: Jukebox logic

Last night I had dinner with friends & family at Mel's Drive In on Highland @ Hollywood Blvd. As we were leaving, I had an odd thought... the classic 50's style jukebox controls in each booth? What kind of control signal did they send to the Wurlitzer? Seems like something that should be researched for the Dead Media Project.

Along those lines, what kind of logic would you use if you wanted a good jukebox, and how could you apply similar techniques to your MP3 collection?

I've only done limited webcasting... set up a ShoutCast server for a while at a previous job; had a station on Live365 too. But with the RIAA fees, no way I'm going to do an open circuit cast...

What kinds of things do you expect a jukebox to do?

1. Let users select from a list of available songs those that they want to hear.
2. Play those songs, in the order they've been requested.
3. When no songs are in the user's queue, continue to play music

Those seem like the basics. Now, ultimately, once a song has been played, it can leave the queue and the player can forget about it. It would be nice to increment a counter so you can determine popular songs. And since you're doing this with some real control logic, a time/date stamp of last played might be nice. So when the juke goes into random mode, it can play popular songs that haven't been heard recently.

Now that I think of it, with the exception of unattended play, webcasting with a micropayment system to cover royaltees could actually work. The micropayment may have to be variable and based on how many listeners are on the stream at a given time, but that might be ok. You want to hear a song? Go to the jukebox, pop in your quarter, and pick it from the list.

Someone's probably patented it though...

More random thoughts later.