A simple, display-free jukebox for Raspberry Pi. Controllable with a numeric keypad (numpad).

You may like this if you:

• want to listen to music without having to use your phone, tablet or PC. I spend all day at the computer and don't want to look at a display when I listen to music at night.

• like listening to albums from start to finish, like they did when only records, tapes and CDs existed.

• own a USB DAC you can attach to the Raspberry.

• have an external USB hard drive to store the music.

• have a spare numeric keypad (or normal keyboard) to control the jukebox

• have a pen and paper where you write up the list of albums ("display") stored on the USB drive, for example

  • 001: Michael Jackson - Thriller
  • 002: Nicki Minaj - The Pinkprint

  which corresponds to the folder structure

  /mnt/
   |--001/
   |  |--Michael Jackson - Thriller/
   |     |--track1.wav
   |     |--track2.wav
   |     |--...
   |--002/
   |  |--Nicki Minaj - The Pinkprint/
   |     |--track1.wav
   |     |--track2.wav
   |     |--...
   
  

  where /mnt is the mount point of the USB drive. The important part here are the upper-level directory names (001, 002). The directory structure below doesn't matter, the folders Micheal Jackson..., and Nicki Minaj... are optional. The program finds .wav, .mp3 and .flac files with the find command.

This assumes you run a system with systemd, pulseaudio and mplayer installed, and have a user named alarm. The install.sh script activates autologin for user alarm and appends a line to alarm's .bashrc, starting the program usbmusi.sh after automatic login. Commands are read from a numeric keypad.

I use an fstab entry to automount /dev/sda1 on /mnt. Obviously this will only work reliably if /dev/sda1 is always assigned to the USB drive. For me it does the job, since I only ever have one USB drive on the Raspberry. See e.g. this Arch wiki article and user infinite-etcetera's post on serverfault.com.

Take a look at the install.sh script.

Choose an album from the paper list and read off the number. To start playback, type the number into the keypad and press Enter. Note that the number 999 is reserved for shutting down:

• * skips forward one track
• \ skips to the beginning of track or backward one track
• + increases volume
• - decreases volume
• CTRL-C exits the program
• 999[Enter] shuts down the computer

• Arch's PulsAudio/Troubleshooting
• Ronald van Engelen's alsa_capabilities.sh