It's time to introduce my music player, because I've mentioned it here from time to time.
You may wonder why anyone tries to make another player nowadays, because there are already a lot of them and many people no longer maintain their own music collection. But I had a reason: None of them was suitable for the original purpose. It was supposed to be a built-in device for historical jukebox wallboxes (mechanical remote controls for jukeboxes, google "seeburg wallbox"), which customers of a jukebox workshop occasionally wanted to convert to operate as MP3 player. Unfortunately this did never happen due to a decease, but I continued to tinker with the program.
Originally, the program was only supposed to play music and text, and the control would have been done via the buttons of the wallbox. For this, the chosen programming in Hollywood would have been optimal. Now instead it has a full GUI optimized for small touchscreens, but also works with large screens. The GUI elements are completely built with Hollywood, which was partly only possible with tricks. You can think about how a mouse click into the input field of the search can put the cursor to the right text position.
In the meantime I built two players with Raspberry and HiFiBerry Amp2, which are used in garden arbors, one with 5" display, the other with 7".
The program displays synchronized texts parallel to the music playback, which must be present in LRC format. Besides playing playlists or shuffle the files, it can also be used in jukebox style, offering the user the tracks in the form of jukebox title strips (but without A or B sides).
Here are a few screenshots:
First is the music playback in progress, the text scrolls vertically and the current line is highlighted:
Tapping (or clicking) the screen brings up the controls:
The magnifying glass leads to the search:
and the stylized Wurlitzer 1015 to the jukebox display. In the left column a few tracks are selected:
And the jukebox can also show cover images, but then the page change will be slower, because many image files have to be loaded:
In the screenshots, besides the built-in fonts, I did use the Albertus Extra Bold font, if you want this too, you have to download it.
The program is here. In addition to the progam file avcodec.hwp and svgimage.hwp are needed. At the moment the messages of the program are only in German.
To change the settings you have to edit the text file Lyrics_Jukebox.config. The entries there are commented, but also only in German. The most important are the two entries of the directories for music and for the lyrics files. I created empty folders, and as soon as there is at least one MP3 file in "Music", there should be no warning message when starting the program.
At the moment only MP3 files are supported.
I downloaded the lyrics mainly using Minilyrics and the extensions for foobar2000. This website is also helpful: Lyricsify.
One obstacle at the moment is the older ffmpeg version used for Linux, which doesn't handle variable bitrate files very well. For now I've converted my entire music collection to constant bitrate using ffmpeg, let's see when I find the time to rebuild Hollywood's avcodec.hwp with a current ffmpeg version.
I don't know yet if I will be happy if someone finds bugs, but anyway please report all.
Ralf
