Mike's Juke Joint
©2008 Michael J. Petro

Locating Your Library
Navigating the Main Screen
Track

Locating Your Library

After you have organized your library correctly, double-click on the Mike's Juke Joint (MJJ) icon on your desktop, or select the program from the Start menu. You will be prompted to browse for your library.

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.

Hint: When you exit MJJ, it consolidates the information it has gathered about your collection and writes it out into an extended M3U file placed in the library folder, called "MikesJukeJoint.m3u." This is what makes subsequent re-scans faster (except for any tracks you've added since the last scan). You might find it prudent, especially for larger collections with thousands of tracks, to back this file up by making a copy of it. (Although I am reasonably confident with the stability of MJJ, at least in this regard, I lost many, many iterations of my precious M3U file during the development phase.)

Navigating the Main Screen

The default presentation of your library by MJJ is a page of buttons, 18 per page, each representing an Artist folder, and decorated with up to four album covers. (For those with no album art provided, you will see a "No Picture Available" image. For those with more than one album cover, but less than four, you will see little "NPA" images filling in the remaining quadrants of the button. The image used for the missing album art may be substituted - more on that in another section.) An alternate presentation, consisting of simple solid-color buttons, is available which raises the number of Artists-per-page to 96. This, along with the "color-scheme" of the buttons, can be changed in Edit->Preferences..., also discussed elsewhere.

Note that in Thumbnail mode, the Artists proceed alphabetically left-to-right, while in "buttons" mode, they are presented top-to-bottom. I'm not sure why I did this, but it just seemed perceptually intuitive.

These buttons, in either mode, are "pushbutton" type buttons, which means that when single-clicked, a button becomes "selected," and shows this by becoming the only indented button on the page (in the image above, "Gang of Four" is selected.) Once selected, you may "drill" to that artist's album collection, add the artist's tracks to playlist(s), or directly into the playing queue. Double-clicking on the Artist button is a shortcut for "Drill to Albums...", while a left click brings up the "Add To Queue..." dialogue. (There are many places where double-clicking or right-clicking exposes menus and features in MJJ. Explore.)

At the bottom of the main screen, you will see a slide bar, standard audio play controls, and an alpha-symbolic array of buttons, with left and right arrows to the sides. The slider becomes active during songplay, indicating the progress of the current song, and may be used to "drag" the song forward or backwards to a new play position. The audio controls become active whenever a track is selected, and play may also be started by simply double-clicking the track (only permitted when the queue is not in control of play.)

The left and right navigational buttons become active when there are more pages of Artists available, and may be used to click, a "page" at a time, to the previous or next 18 (or 96) Artists. The alpha buttons can be used to "jump" to Artists starting with a particular letter. The "#" button, found before the "A", is provided so that you may have access to Artists with numeric or symbolic names, for example "311." (Now, as a matter of personal preference, I have no entries like this. My "311" artist folder is named "Three Eleven" so it sorts with the "T's," and within the Artist folder I have placed a file titled "311.title," which alerts MJJ as to the correct display name of the Artist. See Files Special To Mike's Juke Joint for further reference.)

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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