This is a brief illustrated description of what the jukebox can do. The idea is to give you a flavour of the project so that you can decide whether or not it's worth looking into further.

Before we had this jukebox, we already had normal stereo systems in two rooms, one in the kitchen and one in the lounge. The only additional equipment now seen by the jukebox user is the remote control. The heart of the jukebox is a server PC but that's hidden away.

The jukebox uses a spare input to the existing stereo amplifiers — the Tape socket. To listen to the jukebox, we select the Tape input on the amplifier and use the jukebox remote control to select the music we want to listen to. The remote control gives access to over 12,000 tracks taken from about 800 CD albums. It also has the controls you'd normally expect on a CD player: play, pause, stop, next track, previous track. There's no volume control on the jukebox remote, so we use the stereo system's volume controls on its own remote.

The remote control is about the size of a large-ish paperback book, which opens to reveal a screen and keyboard. It connects to the server PC by radio. There's a stylus (like a slim pencil) to make selections on the screen, the equivalent of a mouse with a PC screen. The remote control is battery operated, but unlike most remote controls, the batteries last only a few hours. So the remote control spends most of its time plugged in to the battery charger, and we find it perfectly convenient to use it there most of the time, rather than unplugging it and picking it up.

The remote control also doubles as a web browser. From any room we can search with Google, look at the weather forecast, entertainment guides, etc, etc. Particularly useful is the link between the jukebox and the browser, making it easy to look up Amazon reviews or Google search results for the album or artist that we're listening to, or any other artist or album on the jukebox.

The kitchen remote control in its normal place on top of the amplifier

About the photo:

1. The blue thing sticking out of the left side of the keyboard is the radio link to the server.
2. The power lead is at the back right of the remote control. It can easily be removed for mobile operation.
3. The stylus (black) is lying in front of the keyboard.
4. There isn't a CD or CD case in sight!

The most straightforward way to find music is to start at the home page, which is in the tabbed section occupying the left-hand section of the screen (we'll come to the right-hand section later in this page):

The home page

As on a normal web page the blue underlined words are links that we can click on. Let's go for Popular Albums:

A sample index page

The display has switched from the "Home" tab to the "Index" tab. The illustration above shows just one of the many index pages. Most of the links on the home page lead to alphabetical indexes roughly similar to that above, and the letters on the left lead to the other pages of those indexes. In the "Popular Albums" index, the numbers (1), (2), etc, tell us how many albums there are for each artist. Clicking on an artist with more than one album leads to a list of albums; clicking on an artist with only one album goes straight to that album. Let's see what there is for Leonard Cohen:

A sample artist index page

The Leonard Cohen page lists the six albums. For each album, we can click on the left grey button ("Play Now"), or the right grey button ("Play Later"), or the blue-underlined album title (to see further details). Let's click on I'm Your Man:

A sample album details page

The check marks indicate tracks to be played — they're initially all checked, but we can uncheck them individually to skip tracks. Alternatively, if we just want one track or a few tracks, it's quicker to click on to clear all the check marks and then check the tracks we do want. Having set the check marks, we click on to play the music straight away or to play it when the music that's currently playing or waiting to be played has finished. The music plays through the amplifier and speakers.

On the right of the screen is the Player section. This shows what's playing and provides the usual player controls.

A sample player display

In the middle of the player section are the five principal control buttons (play, pause, stop, previous track, next track). One of the first three will have a green "illuminated" centre indicating what the player's currently doing. Above the buttons and below the cover image are the indicators showing the current track number, time elapsed, and time remaining. The graphical indicator can be clicked to go directly to any place in the track. In the sample to the right, the jukebox is playing, and is about two thirds of the way through the track.

In the cream-coloured "Now playing" section you can click on the name of the track to see the lyrics, or on the name of the artist to see what other music of theirs is in the jukebox, or on the name (or picture) of the album to see the track names and other information about the album. The lyrics and album information displays change automatically when the player moves on from one track to the next.

While listening to Leonard Cohen we can go back to the tabbed section on the left of the screen and select more music.

There's a lot more that could be said here but this is supposed to be a quick run-through so I'll just briefly mention some other features:

1. The "Top 20" indexes show which composers and artists have the most music available in the jukebox. These indexes are particularly useful for people looking at the jukebox for the first time, to get a flavour of what there is.
2. The "Albums" indexes list only artists for which there are complete albums. The "Artists" section also includes the considerably larger number of artists who have perhaps only one track, on a compilation album.
3. Album and Artist indexes can be viewed as a list of titles or as an array of album covers.
4. The classical "Composers" index lists separately each piece by that composer, even where that piece appears on a CD together with other pieces by that composer or another composer.
5. The "Tracks" indexes list all the tracks for each artist in alphabetical order regardless of which album they're on.
6. The "Years" section of the index lists the popular albums from each year (currently 1958 to 2007).
7. The "Details" tab has an alternate "Sampler" view, which provides a "Play Now" button for each track, and uses colour to show which tracks have already been sampled.
8. The other tabs that you can see but aren't described on this page are:
   • Lyrics: Lyrics of each track (available for over 95% of popular vocal tracks).
   • Queue: A list of the albums and tracks waiting to be played — any or all tracks can be removed from the list.
   • Recent: A list of the albums and tracks that have been played most recently.
   • Lucky Dip: (Our favourite bit!) Not sure what to listen to? The jukebox can make some suggestions, or play random songs, albums, or classical pieces.
   • Newcomers: A list of the CDs recently added to the jukebox.
   • Search: Search the list of albums or tracks, for example pop track titles containing the word "love" (over 500 of them!).
9. The button on the album details page (shown above) opens a new browser window in which we can read what the web has to say about the artist or album we're looking at, using the search facilities of Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia.

A sample Amazon page, accessed from the album details page

You can take a closer look at what the remote control can do by playing with the simulator.