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I spent a lot of time deciphering the messages passing between the Slink-e and the CD jukebox to figure out which messages to intercept in order to monitor or perform particular functions. For this lengthy debugging process, CDJ came in handy because it could create and display a running log of all the messages that passed in and out of the jukebox as CDJ processed them. Eventually — many months later — I had a running web application, which I called Soneta. Soneta listed our CDs and showed album and track details, and with it we could select a CD and control its play. CD metadata was stored in a Microsoft Access database. Initially I pulled the bulk of the data from the CDDB (now Gracenote), but I am very anal about capitalization, grammar and sorting, so I edited almost everything after I inserted it into the Access database. Mixing Revisited
All along, the capability to mix songs continued to nag at me. It turns out that Sony CD jukeboxes can be ganged together and that the Slink-e can actually control up to 12 jukeboxes simultaneously. With two jukeboxes, it would be possible to create playlists that alternated between jukeboxes and even crossfaded tracks as they played! Stifling the guilt, I bought a second jukebox, and then left it unopened on the hall floor for several weeks. Once I felt fairly comfortable that I could actually handle the additional programming, I went ahead and opened the box and connected the second jukebox to the Slink-e.
This was the most challenging part of the project, and I was not at all confident that it was going to work out. The messages that passed to and from the jukeboxes as they crossfaded were very confusing and were compounded by the timing issues that vary between CDs. But eventually, it worked. Success inspired Phase II of the project.
Phase II: Our Own Little Radio Station
The Sony CD jukeboxes took up a lot of space. They’re big suckers. Two of them on top of each other occupy the volume of a dorm room refrigerator. And they’re not absolutely silent as they unload, rotate and load CDs. What would be preferable to maximize the listening experience (and minimize clutter) would be to maintain the jukeboxes in a room apart from our nice, expensive hi-fi. I considered the possibility of streaming digital audio from the jukeboxes through our network and then converting it back to analog at the hi-fi. Digitizing the audio was easy; I simply plugged the analog outputs from the jukeboxes into a pair of M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound cards. Two 2496s can be daisy-chained to appear as one device to the computer. Once the signal was digitized, I experimented with ShoutCast to broadcast the stream over our home network. On the client end, I decoded the stream using WinAmp running on the PC next to the hi-fi, and then fed the audio out from that computer into the hi-fi’s CD input. However, I could not get ShoutCast to stream reliably.
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