Some Ancient History
Mixing tunes is fun. In my previous life back in California, I would create mix tapes for parties. My roommate Chris and I would plug our turntables into his cheap Radio Shack mixer and tape three or four hours of music complete with matched beats and proper crossfades that sounded pretty darn professional. Soon after moving to Virginia in the early 80s, I started purchasing CDs and resumed DJ-ing short sets of tunes for myself by queuing up both the turntable and the CD player and then switching between them with the amplifier source control. The effect wasn’t as slick or sophisticated as using a mixer, but it was still fun. But before long, LPs started to disappear from retail shelves, and I pretty much stopped playing them, too, as my CD collection grew.
The convenience and sound quality of the CD player was great, but I missed the interesting transitions you can sometimes engineer, and sometimes trip over, when butting tracks of varying genres, tempos and themes up against each other. (You just don’t get the same effect when you have to eject, insert and queue up a new CD with each successive track.)
Consolidating the CD Collection
In late 1999, I bought a Sony 300-disc CD jukebox to house our entire CD collection and eliminate the piles of jewel cases that were cluttering up the living room. Playing one CD or another was now simply a matter of turning a knob on the jukebox to select the proper slot on the jukebox. I soon discovered, however, an obvious problem with this device — after the first 10 or 20, it's a little difficult to keep track of which CD is in which slot. Sony provided a cheap plastic binder in which you could store the inserts from the CD jewel cases in numbered pockets, but leafing through page after page of pocketed jewel box inserts didn't help much when they weren’t in any particular order. And some CDs didn’t even have inserts.
I kept the jukebox in an armoire along with a computer, so I thought about creating a database for the CD collection that would at least tell us which CD was in which slot. Around this time, I also stumbled upon information about devices and software that could be used to control the jukebox from a computer. Sony included a port on the back of this particular jukebox (and subsequent models) through which information passed detailing which disc was playing, the track number, playing time and so forth. Commands could also be sent to this port to instruct the jukebox, for instance, to play or fast forward the disc in a particular slot.
