Hallelujia, a jukebox for college and community radio that isn't a cluttered mess!
Snazzbo features:
- Comes pre-loaded with the absolute bestest college, community, pirate and internet stations from around the world, most of them streaming 128k shoutcasts or better. All the data comes live from the database at goodradio.org so things should stay reasonably up to date even after I've lost interest in the project. And its easy to add stations that aren't already included, or please suggest a station if something's glaringly missing. Its still a bit thin on the internet-only stations.
- You can also play songs or playlists from your harddrive or network, which makes it a badass touchscreen jukebox.- One of my favorite features is the dynamic playlists function, where it'll choose a random song from a folder on your harddrive or network. And it'll keep picking random songs until you tell it to stop.
- All the buttons and radio stations get purdy logos, and if you want to swap one just drag some image onto the button and presto change-o. You can even drag an image from Firefox or whatever.
- Records! Can record any radio station you're listening to, and the recording is an exact copy/rip, not some hissy soundcard recording.
- When listening to a radio station can see the station's phone number, homepage, etc.
- Very touchscreen friendly, which sounds like a Craigslist posting title.
- Totally portable installation. Doesn't install anything outside of its own directory, so if you want you can run it from an external harddrive or thumbdrive.
- Upgrading should have no effect on your preferences and buttons.
Here's a screenshot, click it for a bigger one. Can you tell I've been using an iPhone?
Usage is pretty straight forward:
- click (or touch) a button to play that station.
- right click a button to edit it.
- to make a button play a playlist or song, go to the edit screen (right-click the button) and scroll to the bottom of the stations pulldown list and select "play local file".
- to make a button play a random song from a folder, go to the edit screen (right-click the button) and scroll to the bottom of the stations pulldown list and select "dynamic playlist from folder" then browse to the folder. Now each time you click this button it'll create a dynamic playlist including subdirectories, so if you're pointing it at your entire jukebox it might take a moment. When it finishes the first song it'll pick another without having to regenerate the directory listing, so its much faster than the first time. If you're working with a huge directory or a network path, you might want to click the "next" button when you want to skip a song so it doesn't have to build the directory listing over again. And a little advanced tip: it saves its dynamic playlist to c:\program files\radioactive\dynamic_playlist.pls, so if you don't need the dynamic regeneration you can also rename that file and then use the "play local file" option.
- you can add a caption below any button by using the little text field on the edit screen. So for example if a button is triggering a song from your harddrive, you can label it.
- you can change any button's graphic by dragging an image onto the button from Windows Explorer or Firefox! Sorry to shout but I love this feature. And just for goofs the graphic you drag is saved to a folder which you can access by clicking Stuff --> Show saved logos folder. I figure people might want to re-use graphics so why not save them. You can delete stuff from this folder without affecting anything.
- go fullscreen by clicking Stuff --> Fullscreen, exit fullscreen with the ESC key- browse additional pages of stations with the arrows at top left and top right. There's no limit to the number of pages you can have.
- to assign a station or song to a blank button, just click the button.
- to go to a homepage for a station while you're listening, click the home planet icon.
- its not really obvious yet, and I should change this, but to see the phone number of a station, right-click its button.
- volume up and down is the + and - icons (I know, I need better icons for the top bar). Nice and easy to control with a touchscreen.
- see your recent history with the circular arrows button thingy next to the stop button. Useful for finding that station you were listening to a little while ago. Stores the last 12 stations.
- update the list of stations from goodradio.org by clicking Stuff --> Update Stations.
- if you're having stuttering issues, see the buffer amount in the statusbar. Maybe that station is overloaded? Or maybe you need to see a speech therapist?
- to record, click the record icon at the top of the screen to launch theRecording panel. The recordings are saved to the subfolder "Recordings" in your Radioactive installation directory. You can click Stuff --> Show Recordings Folder to see your recordings.
Advanced Tip: adding your own stations. The easiest way is just to click Stuff --> Suggest A Station, and our committee will put on our robes and decide from on high if we want to add it to the database. But if you want more immediate results and control you can edit the user_stations.xml file in the Radioactive directory. Its pretty simple to do, just open it in a text editor and make new entries, using the format that's there in the sample. A couple of notes:
- the station name MUST be all caps or you're doomed.
- to get the "stream url", one easy way is to play the Shoutcast in Winamp, then right-click it and choose "view file info". If you have instructions for other players, send them over and I'll add them. If you can't find it, point me at the stream and I'll send it over.
- you can set a temporary logo for the station by dragging an image file onto the button from Windows Explorer. But if you assign your custom station to some other button, you'll have to do it again. So to make a persistent logo for the station you can create a graphic file that's 120x100 pixels and place it in the "logos" subdirectory of the Radioactive folder, so by default that's c:\program files\radioactive\logos. The logo needs to have exactly the same name as the station. For example if your custom station is "cbc radio one", the file would be called "cbc radio one.png". If you prefer you can save it as a jpg.
- feel free to send over your custom XML file and I'll add your stations to the main goodradio.org database.
"C:\Program Files\Radioactive\radioactive.exe" -monitor=2 -fullscreen
This would launch non fullscreen on monitor 3:
"C:\Program Files\Radioactive\radioactive.exe" -monitor=2
This would launch fullscreen on monitor 1:
"C:\Program Files\Radioactive\radioactive.exe" -fullscreen
Download It
Download version 3.01 (March 9, 2010). Free, no catch, except maybe that for now its Windows only.
You also might want to check out my College Radio Map.