This page gives you 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 13,000 tracks taken from nearly 900 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, keyboard, and trackpad. It connects to the server PC by radio. 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.

You find music by clicking on links as you would do on a web page, using the remote control's trackpad (though you could just as easily use a mouse if preferred).

Example - finding and playing a Blur album:

1. Choose a genre - Popular.
2. Choose a selection - Album Artists A-Z (artists with at least one complete album in the jukebox).
3. Choose an initial letter - B.
4. Choose an artist - Blur.

Then you see the screen below, with a choice of albums and a choice of actions:

5. Either:
• Click on a Play button to play an album now.
• Click on the name (or cover) of an album to take a closer look.

If you click on (for instance) "Parklife", you see full details of the album and the tracks on it:

Then, to play all or part of the album:

6. Click on checkboxes to select individual tracks to play or skip, if required.
7. Click the Play Now button to play the selected tracks.

Often, if you know what you're looking for, it's quicker to use the Search facility — just enter "parklife" on the remote control keyboard.

As you can see above, there are two buttons for playing music:

	"Play Now", which does exactly what it says (anything that was previously playing is abandoned).
	"Add to the Queue", which plays the music when whatever's playing now has finished. You can queue as much music as you like, maybe several days of it.

The music plays through the amplifier and speakers.

To the left of the index screens that we've just been looking at is the Player section. This is permanently visible. It shows what's playing and provides the usual player controls. Below the Player section is the Queue section which shows what's coming next.

Additionally the current track information is displayed on the monitor screen, which can be seen from anywhere in the room.

While listening to Blur we can turn our attention back to the indexes 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 limit myself to this screenshot which briefly explains the function of each of the tabs along the top of the remote control display, and a typical sidebar on the left:

Each tab has a different sidebar. The Popular sidebar is similar in concept to the Classical one shown above, but offers Artists and Years instead of Composers and Instruments; also tracks instead of pieces. You can explore this and all the other features of the remote control in the Software Demonstration.