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Juke-Box program. |
This is an Excel workbook. It's used to play sound files directly from a list.
You need a player program, like Winamp, to use with it. You select your song from the list, press F4, and it sends it to Winamp, which begins playing it immediately.
I made it for on-stage use on a laptop, where I wanted a repertoire/playlist player that could be operated entirely with keystrokes (no mouse required, though you probably still need one to start it up, etc). This makes it fast for on-stage use.
It makes a list, called "Repertoire," of all the audio files (of type you specify, like wav, mp3) it finds in your folder.
To play a song:
You move the highlight to the desired song.
Press F4 to start play,
It plays it (launches your player program)
It draws a line through it in the list (so you know it's been played).
While the song is playing, you can move to the next desired song to be ready to play it.
To stop play, press the spacebar.
It sends a short audio file called "silence" to the player program to replace the currently playing song. .
If you select and play another song, the current song stops and the new one plays immediately.
This works smoothly with Winamp, which has a quick fade-out and fade-in
You can also make a separate playlist.
You move to the desired song in the Repertoire list , and press F6 (or double-click ). This adds the song to the playlist, which appears alongside the repertoire list..
Then you can go consecutively through that list and play the songs.
It marks the songs played, in both Playlist and Repertoire.
You can go to either list at any time to play a song.
You can move songs up and down in the Playlist with keys. Still no mouse required. You can do this while a song is playing.
You can save the playlist by saving the workbook file.
It uses most any player program you wish.
I've had good luck with Winamp, which starts playing the song immediately (some have to read in the entire file before they'll start playing).
It won't play the songs consecutively on its own, unattended.
It doesn't know when the player program is finished with the current song. I have another version if you're interested in that capability. That one uses an internal player, which is slow to start and doesn't play mp3 files.
Setting it up.
Go to sheet "Setup" and put in the paths to the folder containing the audio files to be played, the type of files for it to look for (wav, mp3) and the path to the player program you'll use (WinAmp, Cool Edit, Media Player, etc).
It's not fancy, but it works, and has proven to be reliable. I didn't really expect it to work with as little development as it got, and started using it right away. It'll get fancied up at time goes on. Right.