julie 0.1 review

Julie is a music jukebox that supports MP3 and Ogg formats and is very configurable

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 26K Developer: Andrew Baumann

0

Julie is a music jukebox that supports MP3 and Ogg formats and is very configurable. It is split into a number of modules that allow the user interface to be run on a different machine from the playing daemon, etc. It is built around the idea of 'continuous playback', with a short songlist that is constantly filled. The upcoming playlist can be modified.

Julie was originally written as an MP3 player for parties. It was often the case that people wanted to add their own songs to the playlist and it took time to get to the machine to press skip when a bad track came on.

Julie was started with a number of simple design goals in mind:

1. Simplicity: Julie should be easy to use when you're drunk.
2. Glue Code: most of the tools are out there (MP3 players etc); we just want them to work together.
3. Flexibility: we want to cater for networks and multiple users.
4. Huge Music Collections: XMMS just doesn't cut it when you want to find a particular song in a 20GB collection.

And thus Julie was born. Originally it used mpg123 to play music (until we found out how horribly broken mpg123 and mpg321 were!) and Julie itself did very little. Thanks to Jaq, Julie now plays MP3s and OGGs natively.

Julie has a very simple interface to use, and allows text searches of songs which can be added the playlist. The playlist provides a preview of the next songs that will be played so you can see what will be playing, and add to, delete from, or re-arrange the selection.

Julie is built around the idea of continuous play. If you do not manually select any music it will just pick for you. You can always edit the playlist or skip tracks, however, and if the impulse takes you, you can play a song directly from the playlist or search results.

The random selection tries to be a bit intelligent: there is also a 'banish' function for songs you never want to hear again, and there is a (configurable) delay within which it will not repeat a song. In the future we hope to add a more intelligent song rating system.

Julie also provides a per-song volume setting, which is stored in the database so you can manually adjust quiet and loud songs without changing the main volume level.