what is mbux?

mbux is a mp3, ogg, and flac music box designed for use at public places. A "public place" can be your private party or a real public place like a bar or a pub. Just a place or time where do you giving others the opportunity to select music but without giving them the total control over the music playing software.

mbux allows the user to select songs from a big song list like every other player do, but it's allowing only adding songs to the playlist and not removing them. So everyone can add songs s/he like without being afraid someone else will delete it right after leaving the computer.

After playing a song it's locked for a configured time. So no one can play the same song over and over.

 mbux is small.

It's a really small C programm which uses libsvga as graphical user interface library. You don't need X11 to run mbux and will also have a cute graphical look And without X11 you don't need to have a big machine as your music box and you could reuse easyly your old Pentium machine to run mbux. (Okay, a Pentium II would be better!;)

 mbux runs under linux.

I like Linux and that's the reason I programmed mbux for it. But there is also another serious reason: With linux as host system you can mount file systems from nearly every operating system. This allows you to keep your music archive on your server and just run mbux on a small client system that's getting the music files from somewhere else.

 mbux is beta but ok.

It works and run stable. It's tested every day by friends of mine using it every evenig at their bar as a public music box. But it's not programmed very well: I used arrays and strings of fixed length and used some poor algorithms. I plan to fix all of this but at the moment i'm to busy. :(

 mbux is open-source is gpl.

Information needs to be free and software is information. Therefore software needs to be free too. Like everything I do, I put mbux under the GNU General Public License. So it's free to use, to download, to copy and it's free to make it better. ;)

 mbux is not...

mbux is not a mp3, ogg, or flac decoder (not until today) and needs to run any linux command line player (like mpg123 or ogg123).

 credits, links & thanks

Many thanks to Harm Hanemaayer and the other people from svgalib. I like this very "simple" and "old school" way of programming.

Many thanks to Raul Rivero for his liblug.

Also many thanks to Michael Hipp, author of mpg123. His command line mp3 player is used in mbux up to version 0.4.

And that brings me to Robert Leslie: He wrote the MAD (MPEG Audio Decoder) library. His library is used in mbux since version 0.6. It's GPL and I like it! ;)

But MAD is only a library and mbux needs a player: mpg321 by Joe Drew is the answer. Thank you, Joe!

Since version 0.6 mbux also supports Ogg and FLAC audio files. Thanks to the Ogg Vorbis and FLAC pleople for their hard work.

A big thank you to Ben from Font-a-licious Fonts for his font "Dimitry". I used it in the mbux logo and in the navigation.

Also a big thank to CK! from Freaky Fonts for his font "Dancefloor Exit". I used it for the dancer in the logo.

Thanks to Frank and the crew from avastar for having the inital idea of a mp3 music box and for testing mbux in real life.

And last but not least: Truly thanks to Linus Torvalds and Richard M. Stallman. Without Linux or GNU nothing of this were possible.

copyright 2001-2005 kai 'oswald' seidler, osw@ldism.de