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Next, I tried Windows Media Encoder (WME). WME was Microsoft’s answer to ShoutCast, and fortunately, also free. WME was actually easier to configure because it had a graphical user interface, and it worked without problems. To further streamline the playing experience, I modified Soneta’s ASPs so that an instance of Windows Media Player was embedded in an HTML frame at the bottom of the screen. This eliminated the need for a standalone player like WinAmp. I broadcasted a pretty fat stream — 768kbps — not quite CD quality, but pretty close (considering a lossless PCM CD-quality stream is just over 1,000kbps.) To allow WME to broadcast whether or not I was logged into the server, I ran WME as a service using FireDaemon. WME used about 30% of the CPU. I wasn’t sure whether it was good to be at that level constantly so I added a layer of automation that started the WME service automatically when Soneta was started, then stopped it when the web browser running Soneta was closed. To perform these actions, batch files were called when the browser started and exited. Finishing Touches
Later, the process was simplified with the addition of a second ActiveX EXE that wrapped WME. This eliminated the need for the WME service and batch files.
At this point, I felt the project was more or less complete and did nothing more than tweak it a bit here and there.
All told, the project consumed, on and off, about five years: a lot of effort, but it was gratifying to be working on a one-of-a-kind application — even as Rube Goldbergian as it was. The Slink-e had an active user community, but as far as I know, no one else was working on a project using VB and ASP to interface and control the Slink-e and Sony jukeboxes and then broadcast the results.
And Then…
But there were looming issues. A year or so after I purchased the Slink-e, Colby Boles, the brains behind Nirvis Systems and the Slink-e, sold himself and all Nirvis intellectual property to Microsoft. While Nirvis continued to operate as a business entity, it started the slow, inexorable decent toward oblivion that a company experiences after Microsoft syphons off its life juices. Furthermore, Soneta was based on complicated and delicate mechanical devices: the jukeboxes themselves. I began to wonder how long they’d last. If they broke, would I even be able to find replacements that would work with Soneta?
iTunes was coming on strong, and there were more and more options for hard disk-based music systems all the time. Beyond the question of Slink-e and jukebox life-expectancies, Soneta had other issues and limitations compared with hard disk-based systems, among them:
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