Roger's AMi-Rowe Jukebox

What is it?

It was made by AMI, the oldest manufacturer of jukeboxes in the world, they were bought out by ROWE in the early 60's.
They continued making Vinyl and CD jukeboxes under the name of ROWE INTERNATIONAL, their main business now is making bill changers.
They used to change the models nearly every year, and this one is probably a "Jao-200" also known as a "Bandstand". Launched in 1966, they made around 4700 of them.
It had a long life in the "Limes" in Catisfield, Fareham, and has the dents and braille to prove it.
When the original mechanism wore out, it was deemed beyond economical repair (at the time) and retired.
Paul was the engineer that worked on it the most, and after retirement he had it at home for a while. But the boards were cracked/and warn through, and the bearings kept sticking. So even after many repairs, it would often break the record instead of playing it! So it was put into storage. I got it after it had been stored in a shed for 8 years under a plastic cover (Thanks Paul!).
I replaced the original mechanism with a computer controlled version, that from the outside looked the same. It became probably the first ever Hard Drive jukebox in 1997.

Mark 1

NICAM compression based full size jukebox - Completed around September 1997
Just over 400 audio tracks were downloaded by Digital Audio Extraction from various audio CDs, then compressed using a homewritten NICAM compressor, and dumped down onto the hard drives.
Features :-

Hardware :-
- An old AMD 80386DX-40 motherboard.
- A Creative Labs Vibra 16 sound card.
- An 8G Quantum Bigfoot, and a 4G Quantum Stratus, giving 12G of disk space.
- The front panel switches and the button release solenoid connected to the parallel port via some simple electronics.
NICAM compression was used to reduced the audio data rate from 176400 to 110690 bytes per second.
Enough disc space for over 450 tracks.
Completely homebrew software, written in C as a 16-bit DOS program.
After booting the program scans the original front panel switches, tracks are selected just like they used to with the original mechanism.
From the outside it reacts just like the original juke box would have (apart from the coin slot not working!).
It runs from DOS, this means that I don't need to worry about shutting the system down properly, I can just pull the power from the wall.

This was used in the "party room" at a house I shared for several years.

Planned Mark 2

I started generating Ir-codes to control a Sony CD-P200 CD-changer, to increase the capacity, but MP3/Flac with higher density/cheaper HDDs meant that I changed direction.

Mark 2

Mpeg 1 layer 3 compression based full size jukebox Completed in May 1999

Features :-

Hardware :-
- A Pentium P166 motherboard.
- A Creative Labs Vibra 16 sound card. (reused from Mark1)
- An old 1.8G Western Digital drive.
- Reuses the switch and solenoid interface from the Mark 1.
Mpeg 1 layer 3 compression used to reduced the audio data rate from 176400 to 16384 bytes per second,originally based on a DOS port of the mpg123 software, now based on my port of a later version, see my MPG123 for DOS page for details..
Enough disc space for over 420 tracks.
Still looks and feels like the original jukebox would.
Best next track search for improved music continuity.
LCD 16 character, 2 line display which shows what is playing and what will probably be next.
Homebrew control software, written in C as a 32-bit protected mode DOS program (compiled with the DJGPP compiler).
Still runs from DOS (Source code).
Track linking:
- All of the tracks have been catagorised, and each can be in any number of catagories (e.g. Rock, 70's, Fast, Slow etc.).
- When the jukebox is about to play a track it scores all of the tracks in the "toplay" list, comparing them to the track which has just finished.
- For each catagory which matches some points are added, if its by the same artist then more points are added, for every minute it's been waiting more points are added.
- Once all of the queued up tracks have been scored, the one with highest score gets played.

This was originally completed in time for a friend's wedding, where it was a great success. It's since been used for several other weddings, and numerous parties.
It was lent to a pub for a few months while they got their CD one fixed.
But it's not very portable, so I went on to develop the Mark 3 - AKA Portable V1

Pics

My Jukebox, the track listings all lit up

My Jukebox, closeup of the 7" single and the funky lights

My Jukebox, 1/- is one shilling, and it got you three songs

The various jukeboxes

AMI-Rowe	Portable V1	Portable V2	Seeburg SC-1

The software

The software is open-source, see Here.

Links

This page was lasted updated on Sunday, 10-Aug-2014 08:52:53 BST