Features

was designed from the ground up to have the same look and feel as a bar-style CD jukebox, yet also have many advanced features for navigation, selection and content management.

In a nutshell, what separates from the internet/downloading jukeboxes is:

• As the owner/operator of the jukebox, since you are responsible for purchasing 100% of the content, you get 100% of the revenue.
   
  
• Since it's "Standalone", there is no expensive internet connection to maintain...
   
  
• You do not have to pay fees to remove music from one location and add it to another (you can "rotate" content just like you could with vinyl/CD jukeboxes)...
   
  
• You can tailor the music completely for a given location, no payola schemes where Top 40 music is forced into the jukebox rotation...
   
  
• You do not have to worry about the jukebox manufacturer/distributor pushing their own advertisements onto your jukeboxes (I've heard many complaints from locations where liquor that isn't served is advertised prominently on the internet/downloading jukeboxes)...
   
  
• Content-wise, your customers would probably rather choose from, say, 400 locally stored albums at 3-4 credits per dollar, versus 2 credits per dollar for "locally cached" music and 6-8 credits for music that has to be "downloaded"... What they don't tell you is they arbitrarily choose 2-3GB of music as "local" and everything else as "downloadable". In other words, if you have to search for a song and pay 7 credits to "download" it, you'll find out that the next time you want to play that song, you will still need to pay 7 credits and have it be "downloaded" again, even though, that song is most likely already available on that jukeboxe's hard drive)!! Total scam! If you as a customer, are subsidizing the location to add music (just like buying $.99 downloads online, you would think that the bar would have that song "in the bank" going forward, but that's not how it works with the downloaders...
   
  
• One of the biggest complaints (of which there are many) that I hear about the downloaders is that only the top 2-3 popular tracks from a given CD are included locally (which makes you have to pay 7 credits to hear your favorite song) Now, who ever heard of including 2-3 tracks from Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon"??? With JukeANator, since you can purchase a whole CD online for only a few dollars more than cherry-picking a handful of songs, then give your patrons the choice to pick which tracks they want to hear.
   
  

Linux and Mac OS-X Support
JukeANator is capable of running under Linux and Mac OS-X, provided that the appropriate Java Runtime Environment (JRE) from Oracle, formerly Sun, has been installed on the machine including the Java Media Framework. JukeANator can be extended via the ISongPlayer or IVideoSongPlayer java interfaces (using dependency injection in JukeANator.properties), to use any user-defined song player (if native, then can be interfaced through JNI, or otherwise)

Automatic Cover Art Extraction from iTunes
When performing a disk scan, any iTunes songs with the cover art embedded in them will be extracted and used for the cover art.

Automatic Cover Art Retrieval from Amazon.com
When performing a disk scan, if any cover art isn't present (any valid JPEG file), then an attempt is made to retrieve the cover art from Amazon.com using either the CD artist/title embedded in an ID3 tag (or via the names of the parent folders). Well, this feature has been around for a long time, but I've enhanced it with the ID3 support as of late...

Dual Display ScreenSaver
A new screensaver option for dual display systems shows the main screen saver on the (presumably) primary touch screen display and a (presumably an HDTV or non touch screen display) cover art taking up the whole display on the secondary display.

Pulse Bill Acceptor Support
When used in conjunction with a keyboard encoder, JukeANator can interface with any +12v pulse-based coin/bill acceptor.

Keyboard Mappings
JukeANator can be configured to map all UI actions as keystrokes (which can be used to use physical buttons instead of a touch screen)

Spanish
JukeANator is available with support for Spanish and can be extended (both text and graphics) to any Country/Language combination.

Video/Karaoke
JukeANator can be configured to play video/karaoke content, preferably on a dual display system. (for commercial use, you must secure the appropriate rights)

Dynamic Song Player
JukeANator can be configured to play multiple proprietary song types. That is, you can have Windows Media, iTunes/QuickTime content mixed together along with standard MP3s and JukeANator will automatically switch the song player that supports that song type.

Video/Advertisment Screen Saver
JukeANator can be configured to have a screen saver that will play either videos or static images that are user-provided. (for commercial use, you must secure the appropriate rights)

Configurable Screens
JukeANator can be configured to selectively hide/show all screens/buttons on the UI.

CD Panel Display
Songs are displayed in CD Panels, that contain the CD Cover Art, Artist, and Genre, as well as the songs themselves in their original track ordering. The net effect is that you have a traditional cover art/song listing association that helps many people to know songs and new play indicators for individual songs to further remind you of which songs off a particular CD are most popular.

Song Play/Usage Indicators
There can be an icon next to a song that indicates its level of "popularity" or whether or not it is queued to be played or is the currently playing song. There can be from one to three green bars next to a song to denote how popular this song is, that is, how many times it has been played. This is made possible by keeping statistics on all song plays. In addition, there is also a "randomlyPlayed" flag that is set whenever a song is played at random. What this means is that song will not be randomly selected again until all songs have been played or if the user wishes to reset the song statistics in the Admin screen.

CD Jukebox Look and Feel
The user interface looks and acts like a bar-style CD jukebox. There is a familiar control panel at the bottom of the screen with buttons to allow the user to browse through pages of 4 CDs at a time. Extensive usability testing was performed with many different age ranges and backgrounds of people to ensure ease of use.

Navigation
You can browse 4 CDs (cover art and track listing) at a time with no need to constantly click on a cover art to see the song listings like other digital jukeboxes. Unlike physical flap-based CD jukeboxes, you can jump from the top to the bottom or from one style of music to the next. You can even jump to the page that contains the CD panel of the song that is currently being played or to the song that is queued up next. There 's even a history, or "back" button that allows you to backtrack the screens allowing you to retrace your steps of up to ten screens (including jumps, searches and views on the popularity screens)

Song Selection
All CDs in the digital jukebox are automatically assigned a number based up how it fits in the genre/artist/cd title ordering scheme. This CD number, combined with the track number of a song, creates a unique number that is used to identify the song. Like conventional CD jukeboxes, this number can be used to select a song from the control panel regardless of which CD panels are being displayed, but since CD numbers can change whenever new CDs are added to the system, it is easier just to select a song to be queued by either single-clicking on it and pressing "Enter" , or simply by double-clicking on it. You can also add songs into the song queue by loading playlists or entire CDs at a time by using the special "00" track number (or by double-clicking on a CD 's cover art)

Search
You can search on keywords by Artist, Song Title, CD Title, or everything. Songs that have exact matches will appear at the top of the search results, followed by songs that have partial matches that match the beginning of the word (e.g. "Aero" will match for "Aerosmith" ), followed by songs that have partial matches that occur anywhere in the word (e.g. "smit" would also match for "Aerosmith" ). Next to the search results list is a CD Panel display that will show the CD panel for the currently selected song from the search results. This is to allow you to see the cover art and other song listings from that CD. You can use either your keyboard or the on-screen keyboard to enter in the search keywords. The on-scren keyboard is necessary for keyboard/mouse-less "kiosk" operation, such as for a party or in a custom jukebox cabinet in a bar.

Comprehensive CD/Song Popularity
Every time a song is intentionally played, it 's play count is incremented. If a song is played at random by the random play feature, then that is kept track of too. Songs are contained by a CD Title, which has an age associated with it. What all this means is that all the statistics compiled by the digital jukebox are conveyed back to the user in the interface in two basic ways: One, every song has a usage icon that will reflect it 's play count by way of zero to three green bars next to it. Two, the "Popular" screen can show displays of the Top 50 and Top 100 songs or CDs in the system.

Power Ranking Display
Since the age of songs/CDs is kept, ratings by "Power" can also be shown. If two songs both have 10 plays, but one has been in the system half as long as the other, then the newer song will have a higher power ranking. Basically, his feature allows you to see what is "hot" and getting the most plays in the shortest amount of time.

New CDs Display
Another feature related to keeping the age of songs/CDs is the ability to show listings of newly added CDs to the system. These new CDs are also visually denoted by having a red CD panel border (instead of white).

Explicit CDs Display
CDs that have been tagged as having explicit lyrics will be shown with a blue CD panel border. Combined with the "allow explicit lyrics" setting from the admin screen, this means that you don 't have to worry about songs being played at random with explicit lyrics in case you have children or are in more formal company. This also allows the bar owner to decide when to allow these types of CDs to be played.

Recently Played Songs Display
As songs are played, a listing of the songs that have been played (in the order in which they were played) is kept in the Popular screen when the view is set to "Song" and the display is set to "Recent" . This feature allows you to go to the digital jukebox to see what a particular song was named or what CD it was from in case you liked the song and didn 't know anything about it.

Style/Genre Listings
Because CDs are stored under a top-level genre folder, it is possible to to keep like music together. This way, you don 't have to wade through fifty Country CDs if you are in the mood to hear 80 's music. From the Style screen, you can see a listing of all the styles of music in the system and be able to jump from any one style to another just like like that. While browsing CDs from the style screen, you can use the "next by style" button to jump from the artists whose names begin with "A" to the artists whose names begin with "B" , so if you are viewing your Hard Rock collection, you can skip over your entire AC/DC and Aerosmith collection if you are in the mood to play Black Sabbath songs.

Song Queue Administration
Like a normal bar style jukebox, you have the song Jukebox, which is a collection of songs available to be played and the song Queue, which is a dynamic collection of songs that are going to be played. This queue is an ordered list of prioritized songs. You can adjust the current priority so that any new songs that are selected will automatically be placed into the queue higher than lower priority songs. There are features for rejecting the current song, removing all songs, playing any song immediately, changing the order of the songs, removing unwanted songs, loading a playlist of songs into the queue or saving the queue as a playlist. You can perform many of these functions on multiple songs at once too. There is even a feature for moving selected group of songs all the way to the top of the queue or all the way to the bottom with one right-click of the mouse.

Random Play
As mentioned above, whenever a song is picked to play at random, that song is flagged as having been played and will not be picked randomly again until either all songs have been played at random or until the random play statistics have been reset. This is the original feature that drove the development of JukeANator. You can also specify a minimum number of songs to keep in the song queue. Whenever the queue size gets below this number, songs are picked at random and are placed into the queue at the lowest priority. If you pick additional songs on your own, they will automatically be ordered higher in the queue because they will have a higher priority. You can specify whether or not you want entire CDs to be added, or whether or not you only want songs added randomly that are from the same genre as the currently playing song.

Commercial Mode
With the commercial version, JukeANator can be used in a commercial setting. That is, it was originally designed to be a commercial digital jukebox system. It will talk to either the Mars AE2600 series bill acceptor or the VS2CK GBA bill acceptors. The admin screen button is hidden from view and when that part of the screen is touched, a login screen will appear and the only way to get to the admin screen is to know the userid and password. The amount of credits per $1, $2 or $5 entered is configurable. The user will see a "selections remaining" entry field and will not see the mini-control panel for pausing/rejecting/adjusting current priority level. Since the user can perform all functions without a keyboard, the only thing that need be presented to the user is the touch screen and bill acceptor. JukeANator also has infrared remote control support for pausing or rejecting the current song, adjusting the volume up or down, or putting the digital jukebox into hibernation mode (or waking it up). Hibernation mode comes in handy when you want to disable the digital jukebox because of the big game, band, karaoke or other activity. Also, there is an "attract mode" , where every X number of minutes, a song is played at random if nothing is already playing. In addition, an external audio line-in is supported, where you can feed a radio station or TV audio signal through the speakers if there is no jukebox song playing. JukeANator respects copyrights and has support for displaying copyright information and purchase URL links to sites such as Amazon.com. Lastly, a cool feature to increase your revenue is to have a "Song Priority" dialog that will ask patrons if they would like to use additional credits to hear their song next. To be fair to other patrons (and to your benefit), the number of credits needed to put a song next in the queue escalates so that the person who pays the most, gets to hear their song next. This feature is built-upon the song priority feature designed into the system.

Non-commercial/Free play mode
When using the non-commercial version, there is no concept of credits and selections remaining, you have an unlimited number of selections that you can make. There are also no restrictions to accessing the Admin screen. In addition, there is a mini-control panel by the selection being made entry field that allows you to quickly pause/reject the current song, or adjust the current priority. The current priority defaults to 1. When you have a number of songs that have been selected with 1, then when you increment the current priority to 2 or higher, any future songs you add will be added in front of lower priority songs. For private use, it is not required to have this copyright information displayed on screen. It is the private user 's responsibility to have the rights to have the songs, such as by having the physical audio CDs in their personal collection or having legally obtained digital downloads, such as from the "new" Napster or iTunes.

Multiple Song Format Support
You can choose between Winamp (the default), Windows Media Player 10 Series, or Quicktime to play your digital songs (Real Player support may be added in the future). So, if you buy digital songs that are in WMA format with digital rights management, then you can use change the song player to be Windows Media Player to play those protected format songs, along with your normal MP3s (if you have them). Conversely, if you have a library of iTunes songs that are in the AAC protected format, then you can change the song player to be QuickTime in order to play those protected format songs. Or, if you wish to use native Java libraries to play your MP3s, then you can specify JMF (Java Media Framework).

Duplicate Song Display
In the Admin screen, there is a button for showing the duplicate song finder that will allow you to delete duplicate songs in order to make more space on your hard drive. For example, you may have a "Greatest Hits" CD by an artist and then have other CDs by that artist that have the exact same songs, in this case, you may decide to delete the duplicates as you know where the other locations of the duplicate songs are.

Dud Song/CD Display
In the Admin screen, there is a button for showing the full statistics on either all individual songs or by CD, in which you can see how many plays a song/CD has, how old it is, and how much space it is taking up on your hard drive. You can choose to either delete whole or individual songs that you deem are either too unpopular (i.e. duds) or are taking up too much space. You can also choose to "ignore" CDs so that they still exist on disk, but do not appear in the digital jukebox. This comes in handy when you have seasonal music, such as Christmas Music. It follows that there is an ignored CD displayer that will allow you to un-ignore CDs.

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