Mike's Juke Joint
©2008 Michael J. Petro

Artist
Album
Track

Organizing Your Library

This is to explain how Mike's Juke Joint (MJJ) expects your files to be organized. This is a standard organization, supported by MediaPlayer and other players, so it would behoove to go there anyway.

(Note: The first time MJJ opens your library, or encounters new song files in an existing library, it must physically scan each new file. Depending on the size of your library, his may appear painfully slow. It is. However, once it has built its dictionary files, the process becomes much faster.)

First, they should be organized under a particular folder, with subfolders as will be described. Let's say, for example, that your music is in "G:\Clubhouse MP3s" (as mine is :).

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Within this folder should be folders containing artists, for example, "The Beatles" (or "Beatles, The" if you like alphabetic integrity - you can get the jukebox to display the name properly by placing an empty text file within the artist folder called "The Beatles.title", but I'm getting ahead of myself - I will be working on documenting the many esoteric features which will appear on these web pages.

Within the artist folders, you place album folders, for example, "The White Album" (or "1968 - The White Album" if you want year-ordered album collections... recommended! MJJ is smart enough to strip the year off when displaying the title). Note that you don't have to have the complete album, if you only have a couple of fave tracks, that's OK. This is just a way to organize the music.

Within the album folders, place the tracks themselves, or folders representing "Disk 1," "Disk 2," which can then contain tracks. *** These are the only two levels where MJJ will look for music! ***

Tracks are expected to be in the form "NN-.mp3," where NN = track number - for example "01-Back In The U.S.S.R..mp3." Notice there are no spaces between the track number, the dash, or the name [Update: MJJ now supports the spaces around the dash.] And, in this particular example, the track name ends with a period (.), hence the double period making the extension ".mp3."

The full path of our example resolves to:

G:\Clubhouse MP3s\Beatles, The\1968 - The White Album\Disk 1\01-Back In The U.S.S.R..mp3

If you have album cover art, place it in the album-level folder ("1968 - The White Album"), and MJJ will use it to make your collection pretty :).

There are many features to explore, but this is the basics.

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The unregistered version of MJJ is free, and it will handle a maximum of 10,000 tracks. To support an unlimited number of tracks, a $45 registration fee is required, and I send you codes to unlock Mike's Juke Joint for unlimited access. My collection consists of over 48,000 tracks (legally ripped from my own CD collection), and MJJ handles them fine.

 
Send queries, kudos, complaints, enhancement requests and (gasp!) bug reports to:
Michael J. Petro