Jeff's Amp - embeddable linux distro for headless media player

A CD based linux distro (based on Knoppix) that is intended to run a portable MP3/OGG player in a mobile computer. To use it you simply master a CD with your music and JAMP, put it in the computer, boot and voila, it'll start playing.

It runs a Python jukebox app I wrote that uses PyGame for playing the music. Since PyGame is intended for video games, it does not allow for things like seeking through a track or fancy stuff like that but I figure that isn't too important. The more controls this thing has the harder to use and since you can't get any visual feedback a lot of these things just don't make sense.

There are some other good similar packages out there like AMACDYS. A big advantage of JAMP is it's based on Knoppix which has incredible hardware detection so chances are really good it'll just work. The downside is AMACDYS is a floppy sized file, JAMP is 55M, Eh.

Features

Controls

The controls for this jukebox are intended to be super simple and useable only with a numeric keypad.

The * key is used to switch albums. An album is simply a directory in the CDROM root. The jukebox plays all the songs in the album and is subdirectories. On startup jukebox just loads the CDROM root as the album (meaning it plays all songs on the CD). When you hit * to change albums it will prompt for the album name. You type this in and press return. If you don't enter an album name it will play the root album. If the album does not exist it will be ignored and continue what it was playing. If you are only using a numeric keypad be sure to give you albums numeric names :)

The 0 (zero) or p key is used to pause and unpause the current track.

The + or n key is used to skip to the next track

And that's it! Like I said. Very simple.

Screen Shots

Yes that's the idea. You could shoot the screen and still use this thing. That's how little meaningful information is conveyed by my jukebox. Seriously a screen shot would be pointless.

Mastering your own bootable music CD

Make a directory to store your tunes. I'll use /home/jsc/cdrom and put your music in there.

$ mkdir /home/jsc/cdrom
$ cp -r /vol/music/* /home/jsc/cdrom
$ cd /home/jsc/cdrom
$ ls
movie
pop
..

Now untar the JAMP zipfile into your cd directory.

$ cd /home/jsc/cdrom
$ tar -xzf /home/jsc/jamp-x.x.tgz
$ ls
KNOPPIX
movie
pop
..

Now generate a bootable ISO image

$ mkisofs ...

And burn it!

$ cdrecord dev=0,1,0 mydisk.iso

License

Before you download a copy of the software. Please keep in mind that this is based on the works of other people and their licensing applies to the majority of this.