Submitted by Tony on
Hi everyone, my name is Tony and I am the developer of Jukebox Jockey. I have decided to (attempt to) start blogging a little about some advanced configuration and usage of Jukebox Jockey.
I regularly get questions from customers on how to achieve certain requirements that they may have for Jukebox Jockey and the answers to these questions don't necessarily translate to a tutorial or a specific set of steps or configuration items, and even if they do, I am hoping to try to capture why you would choose to do things one way or another. Hopefully I will be able to share some of my knowledge and experiences solving different real world usage problems by writing some articles. Please be nice to me though, I am not much of a writer!
Maybe a quick note about my experience before I start working on some more juicy stuff.
I have been working on jukebox software for more than 10 years. I guess that it was the late 90's when mp3 really started to make its way into everyone's life and Winamp became the program that everyone was using (at least everyone that I knew). It was exciting! I loved music and I loved computers and it quickly became obvious to me that I wanted all of my music at my fingertips, I wanted to put the CDs away in the cupboard and never touch them again after importing them to my PC. There was one thing standing in my way though, my wife! I needed a program that was easy to use and didn't require knowledge of computers or their file systems. I really needed a full screen app, with large fonts that made it easy to find albums and/or artists and their associated tracks. So I wrote my first jukebox software.
A couple of years later at the urging of my family and friends I started to sell my software on the Internet. Wow! That was a steep learning curve. It's much more difficult to write software for others than it is for yourself. Over the years though I have communicated with all sorts of people from all over the world with a myriad of different ways of wanting to use my software and different visions of what jukebox software should be. In fact that's how I met Jay, my partner in Jukebox Jockey. We live on opposite sides of the world but he had a vision for what he wanted software to look like for his jukebox hire business. He had used my other software previously and had now formed many ideas based on his own experiences and end user feedback on what he felt jukebox software should be.
Obivously jukebox software is very popular for home use so I have worked with many home users, but I have also worked with Jukebox hire/rental businesses, standalone jukebox manufacturers, Audio Visual equipment installers, pubs/bars/nightclubs, restaurants, reception and conference venues, DJs etc. While the general requirements for software are the same for all users, some users have very paricular requirements because of the environment they work in.
When I started working on Jukebox Jockey I was very conscious of the need to be flexible, from experience I knew that we would be getting requests for features that we'd never even thought of. I also know that one person's favorite feature may well be something that another user simply can't stand. I've been working on Jukebox Jockey for more than 4 years, and there's a lot under the covers that I have made allowances for but has either only available via manual configuration changes or possible only by code changes because we simply haven't got around to exposing that stuff yet. Hopefully the articles that I am going to write will help to make some of these things more accessible to those that need them, or simply love to tinker!