We like music here at The Tharp Arms, but we don’t have anything as gauche as a commercial juke box for customers. Instead, for many years we’ve had a Netgear MP101 Media Player mounted above the bar, drawing from a vast, eclectic selection of music sourced on a pc behind the bar.
Customers have always enjoyed having the Netgear on display because it means that they can look up and see the artist’s name and the track title when they hear something they don’t recognise. Or they can request specific tracks and watch as we select from different options.
Sadly, however, the Netgear recently passed away. We have no idea what happened to it, but it developed a rather worrying fascination with the music of Geri Halliwell and refused to select pretty much anything else after that.
The solution was simple – connect the PC directly to the amp and use Media Player to select the music. Everything worked well for about a day before a customer complained that they could no longer see the tracks that were being played.
We resolved this by moving the monitor and housing it behind the bar, but then we discovered that the text on Windows Media Player is woefully small, and that it was almost impossible to read from the other side of the counter, pretty much negating the use of the service in the first place. iTunes suffers from a similar text-size problem, not to mention an inability – as far as I can tell – to choose specific genres rather than artists and albums.
The particular machine we run our music from is a Vista Home Basic solution, so doesn’t include the full Media Centre application, which has left me running my favourite media application, WinAmp.
WinAmp is brilliant, in so far as it’s probably the easiest media player with which to choose groups of tracks, genres, albums etc, and play them quickly. But most of the display options for WinAmp suffer from an equally small fonted deficiency as other media players. I’ve increased the text size but it just becomes blurry and pushes great swathes of information off the screen, and the only skin I have found that uses a nice, large font is relatively untidy on the screen and a little rough around the edges.
I’ve even looked at Spotify, a great solution with a vast collection of music to choose from – but ultimately a small interface still for reading from a distance.
Today I’m trialling MediaPortal, an open sourc
e media centre. Immediate thoughts are that it’s perfect, visually. On screen, it’s neat, clean and displays text at the right font for customers to be able to see what’s playing.
Beyond that it’s a bit rubbish. Despite creating a playlist of 350 songs between the genres Rock and Pop it has spent the last hour refusing to play anything other than Green Day or Paolo Nutini. And there aren’t any media controls to pause, stop or play music, let alone flick to the next track.
The menu options look great, but are slow to respond to any commands and aren’t particularly intuitive, and there doesn’t appear to be any integration with the media controls on my keyboard as there are in WinAmp.
So I’m looking for a bit of advice: what media server solution would you use that meets my requirements: a nice clean, large-fonted interface for visuals behind the bar, whilst being quick and easy to select tracks for the customers. Or does anybody know of a neat, simple skin for WinAmp that does exactly what I need?
In the meantime, I guess the customer’s are going to have to get used to the media interface looking different each time they come in to the pub…
