Disk Music Box

[Jovanna Ponder]

When killed by any skeleton or stray (or wither skeleton if given a bow using commands), a creeper drops a random music disc in addition to its normal drops, with the exceptions of Pigstep, otherside, 5, and Relic.

Because TNT ignited by a flaming arrow attributes all resulting kills to the entity that fired the arrow, a skeleton igniting a TNT block due to holding a bow enchanted with Flame, or shooting through lava or fire, also causes any creepers killed in the explosion to drop a disc.[1][2]

The music discs resemble older 78-rpm phonograph records from the early 20th century, which were often played in jukeboxes from that era. They are used in Minecraft in a similar fashion: A music disc can be played on a jukebox by holding the disc and right-clicking on the jukebox.

Spotify is amazing. With a few taps on my phone I can access all the music I love to listen to, both old and new. Spotify makes it really easy to find something to play and to switch from a track on one album to another.

I like to listen to entire albums from beginning to end. Part of this is because I felt this is what the artist must have intended when creating the track list. However swapping out CDs and changing from a track on one album to another was a really disruptive experience - even with the Sanyo 5 CD changer stereo I had in my later teenage years.

Of course many of the points made above are the same reasons for the recent resurgence in popularity of vinyl records. People enjoy feeling connected to their music. Their music. One property of vinyl records which I like is that moving backwards and forwards within a track, or even from one track to another, is not directly supported by the medium or most players. The single physical groove which spirals from the outer rim to the centre encourages the listener to experience an album from beginning to end. I will not comment on whether or not vinyl records sound better than CDs ;)

My original idea was to use RFID tags on random vinyl records to identify Spotify albums as they were placed on a record player. I developed this concept on and off for a few years, and had bits of working hardware and software in various stages, but after a few years I grew to like the idea of reducing the project complexity (in size and moving parts). In 2017 I was off sick for a few days and ended up binge watching a bunch of Techmoan, LGR and The 8-Bit Guy videos, which seeded in me the idea of using floppy disks. This meant I could remove the RFID tags and reader, and read and write Spotify URIs directly to the disks! Much simpler, and the hardware did not need any construction. A simple USB floppy disk drive and a Raspberry Pi would do the trick.

As the hardware and the floppy disk case are all matte black I thought I would use colour floppy disks with a black shutter to brighten the project up a bit. I found all my disks on eBay, with an average price of around 1 per disk.

My first iteration used Mopidy as a local music server, in conjunction with the Mopidy-Spotify extension. However at some point in last few years, Spotify deprecated the libspotify libary used by the extension, resulting in a loss of functionality:

Spotifyd in turn makes use of librespot which is essentially an open source alternative to libspotify written in Rust. It looks like the people behind librespot have reverse engineered the Spotify Connect protocol.

The configuration is very simple, a single file located at /etc/spotifyd.conf and then the installation of a systemd unit file so that it can be run as a service after boot. This is all well documented in the project README:

I am using the shell script below to act on floppy disk change events. The script checks if the device is listed as part of the attached block devices (lsblk). If it is, this means that a new disk has been inserted. The disk is mounted to a fixed location on the filesystem, the Spotifyd service is started, and the contents of diskplayer.contents file in the mounted folder are used as an argument to the diskplayer player application. The device is then unmounted from the filesystem.

If there is no device listed in the output from lsblk then we assume that a floppy disk was removed. The script then invokes the diskplayer player application with a pause command, and stops the Spotifyd service.

Is that an uncompressed wave audio CD or a disk with music mp3 and aac/m4a files?
I believe auto-play depends on the Desktop used ie plasma 5 or Gnome or LXDE etc. so what desktop are you using and how is it configured?

I just did a test with a data disk containing mp3 files and plasma 5 only gave me 2 choices: open disk in dolphin and Download Photos with digiKam.
but I could start amarok select play media and chose the root of the disk, amarok plays the entire disk, this could be a plasma 5 bug not defining actions for devices with audio files.

BTW, opening with file manager starts Konqueror and it offers all tracks as .wav files. It also offers directories with names like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, which offers you the same tracks as .mp3 and .ogg files. Ready to be copied and thus ripped.

I discovered that my wife had not downloaded all the various bits and pieces needed to successfully do multimedia in 42.1. So poking around I found this very helpful page:
13. Multimedia Codecs - Install Support for restricted codecs including MP3, DVD, WMA, WMV, MOV etc.

You opine that for the Leap 42.1 computer replacing phonon-backend-gstreamer with phonon-backend-vlc as instructed in the guide is not optimal, and instead I should reinstall the phonon-backend-gstreamer package and remove the phonon-backend-vlc package? Correct?

Regarding phonon, also note that Leap 42.1 comes with Plasma5 and many KF5 applications, in this case phonon4qt5 is used and the corresponding backends are phonon4qt5-backend-gstreamer and phonon4qt5-backend-vlc.

The Naim Uniti uses my home network. My Roon core is a Mac Pro. My Qobuz plays over Roon as well ad my iTunes files from the MacPro computer. But, I am not sure why the ROON app does not find Naim Uniti Atom on my network.

My issue with a USB disk attached to a my Naim Uniti Atom not being seen by ROON core was solved. I just moved the disk from Atom to my MacBook pro and then my library of CDs appeared in ROON. Simple!

So if I want to get Roon Rock on Intel NUC I need two disks in it? One for Roon Rock OS and another one for music? If so, how much space is needed on OS disk? Music of course depends about how big my library is (currently around 300 GB or 400 GB).

External is much much easier to deal with than internal for the music files themselves. I have a tall case NUC and it no longer has an internal library drive in it, have moved to a cheap external usb enclosure (for the same Ssd that used to be inside the case). Pure convenience.

I noticed that the price for NUC would be almost around the same than M1 Mac Mini, but I can instead start to use this M1 Mac Mini as my main desktop computer instead of my power hungry gaming PC so it will be better for electricity usage as well. Surely not the best option maybe for Roon as a server when I run some other apps here as well and might break something in future, but in my usage I think it will be more than enough if that works 99 % of time.

At this moment Roon is adding library items and music is playing on this same machine + Mp3 files are copying from external USB hard drive to internal disk and the processor usage is still 75 % idle on all processors, Roon is surely using one core more but it is stilll less than 60 % even when it is doing all the metadata grabbing etc. so all seems to be fine

For some years I have had my Music Library on a NAS, but that one is scrapped now, and I want to have my Music Library on an 1TB USB3 connected M.2 drive on my M1 Mini. I have my Apple Music on the same disk (different folder of course), and this is working well.

thinking about buying an ssd to use for music files in the player computer and eliminate the networked drive. My player computer uses a hdd for the os. I know from experience the networked drive is better sounding than any firewire or usb connected drive on the player computer.

PC with internal music storage drive is a PITA to overcome issues that compromise USB output to DAC. Stick with network attached drive. I didn't find SSD to matter that much until I made my PC a Roon core server

Thanks @davide256 and @acousticmood for the input. I remember back when I used a laptop for a headphone system and it had an ssd for os. Music played from that drive did not sound as good as usb connected spinner and of course when I went networked drive for the music files, standard desktop killed the poor lappy for music reproduction.

wondering if there really is not that much difference running the os of the hdd vs ssd when all I am running foobar and letting a quieted down win 10 do its housekeeping writes and pulling files every so often into cache for foobar???

SSD for OS is better, besides being faster, its electrically quieter and requires less fan cooling. Haven't had one die yet from swap file, knock on wood. If you are using Foobar2000 as renderer, I find Fidelizer Pro really helps improve PC USB out with its OS optimizations for audio.

Yes, I am sure it is quieter, but once Foobar is loaded into memory the only thing the os drive does is housekeeping and cache I suppose. Fan is usually on very low and heat is not a concern at all since it is a big ole desktop. Yet, I suspect it might be nice to have an ssd in there, just a matter of time and $$.

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