The Foundation

With the popularity of digital music (ala iTunes and Windows Media Player), I thought it made sense to begin our journey by setting up a digital jukebox.The goals of the jukebox will be (for starters):

• Ability to play ALL of your digital music tracks
• Ability to play music through your home stereo or receiver
• Ability to control your music from anywhere in the house

At the heart of almost any new technical project is a home computer. The PC has come a long way since its inception when most thought it was a typewriter that doesn’t require white out.Over time, I have been able to acquire dozens of PC’s through upgrades of my own, or as friends and offices were upgrading to the latest and greatest. This has allowed me to dedicate PC’s to specifictasks: Media Servers, e-mail hosts, office machines, home automation server, guest PC’s, and others.

If you don’t have multiple PC’s, that is no problem.

Most new computers today have enough horsepower to be an office tool, e-mail machine, a web surfing research tool, complete photo and movie studio, a music jukebox, a dedicated cardless solitaire machine, and millions of other things at once.  Because of this, the home PC makes a great start for your project.

For our Music Jukebox PC, I recommend a computer with the following MINIMUM specifications:

• Windows XP or 32 bit Vista

• 600mhz Pentium or better

• 512MB RAM

• In order to get the most from your music server. you should also have access to the Internet.

If you eventually plan to add music videos or movies to your server, I recommend the following minimum:

• Windows XP or 32 bit Vista
• 2Ghz Pentium or better
• 1GB RAM
• 32MB video RAM

Beyond the above, you will also want to take into account the hard drive size. Your average digitized music file will be roughly 6MB. This means you could store approximately 160 tracks on a 1GB hard drive.  Since this is not 1990, you will most likely have a hard drive that is significantly bigger then that.I personally like to use an external hard drive connected to my PC via a fire wire cable. This gives me a couple of benefits:

1. I can upgrade to a larger hard drive as needed for more media without having to move all of the applications loaded in my PC to a new drive.
2. In the event of an emergency, I can grab the drive and run.  It is a lot easier to run from the zombies in your robe carrying a little hard drive than a big PC case.

With the hardware in place, it is time to give consideration to software.My next entry will discuss the basic software required to start our jukebox.