There's a text file on the DVD with an end of service date that you can edit to a date in the future, and then burn a new copy of the disc and it will play again.
oh gosh. winamp tried to open source their software and they did it horribly. so horribly that they took the entire project down out of embarrassment. basically just use wacup instead of winamp lmao
We had those at CompUSA before being upgraded to the Satellite streaming system when I was there from 99 to 01 when they were bought out. We would bypass it at night in order to play our own music as well while playing video games on the store systems after closing. Myself and the other tech had to always take care of those.
CompUSA, the greatest computer retail store to ever exist... I think most of my core memories are that place and hunting the rebates with my dad (why does Microcenter suck so much) 😥
@@TechThrowback Yeah, i 100% agree! I still have a lot of the stuff I purchased with my employee discount or that I got nearly free when it was discontinued and when we sold off all the inventory after being sold out. I had a great experience working there as a Tech and then Tech Department Manager when I was just 21-23 years old. The things I saw I’ll never forget. The things people did as well as put on there computers was crazy. I ended up downloading the downloaded music from everyone’s computers that they would spend countless hours downloading from Napster or BeatShare. I had a library of over 10,000 songs lol that I never downloaded from any of the illegal sites lmao. I even worked on the Apple computer with the Joe Dirt Script on it which was flown in on helicopter which landed in our parking lot. Talked to the director on the phone and he was pissed when we told him it would take 2 days to get his parts in. They had to put production on hold. Later we got a call back from him apologizing and he even invited myself and my other Tech down to become extras in the movie. I still have his hand written note stashed away somewhere. Had one guys laptop with a bullet hole through the screen all because he was watching porn and his wife was pissed off. Still replaced it for free as he had the screen protection warranty. I ended up going from there to Gateway Country as a Tech as well.
@@TechThrowback I enjoy your channels and content. I worked at CompUSA and currently work at Microcenter for almost 18 years now. I too have nostalgia for CompUSA, but corporate is much better at Microcenter, plus rebates aren't a thing there anymore, they just give the discount. However, I am interested in knowing why you think it sucks. To see the point of view from a customer, especially you, would be nice. Don't hold back as I am fond of both. Also, if you come to my location, which is closest to you, I will make sure you get the care you deserve.
In 2007 our CompUSA closed, during the liquidation time I was tasked with making a music playlist and add the announcements every three songs which was totally a violation of DRM lol. I was told that we were concerned with closing down and not staying open so it doesn't matter. We lost the satellite once we started closing.
@@angrytexan666 We never got to get that far. Our store closed in 01 after the purchase. I had a quit a few stock options and held out during the initial offer thus waiting to the very end getting 2 dollars more per option lol. Being that we were a smaller town when compared to other locations the Grupo Sanborns closed our location much sooner. It couldn’t have come at a more convenient time as Gateway Country had just built a new store just across the street so that became my new home at least until they closed. Gateway was actually an amazing company to work for which worked out but I still missed the whole CompUSA experience and all my trips to the corporate offices in Addison Texas.
My dad has told me about when he worked at a restaurant called Pizza Inn as a teenager and they only had one audio channel hooked to the kitchen speaker... It was always upsetting when Bohemian Rhapsody came over the system because basically half the song was missing
The cpu is stated on the spec sheet. It's a Motorola PowerPC, the successor to the 68000 series. The OS is probably a UNIX variation. The PowerPC was used in Apple computers after the early MacIntosh's.
Very cool to see inside one of these. I used to work at a Caribou Coffee 20 years ago and they had one of these units. It used the discs to keep up to date. I too unplugged the rcas and hooked up my iPod to play my own music in the cafe 😅
@@alexandrecouture2462 thought so! I was about to ask if he had a twin who also did TH-cam, will have to binge watch the rest of the videos on this channel later
LOL when I worked at T-mobile...we had a new store built and this was in our server room. I used to disconnect that box and play pandora radio over the speakers. This was back in 2006 -2011. Also it had an output on the back of that box to hook into our phone system to play the hold music from those disks too.
I used to live in Charlotte NC in the early 2000’s where Muzak was located, and at the time I worked at Media Play, which sold games, books, movies, and CDs. Every so often a Muzak employee would come by the store and buy CDs to be used by Muzak, in particular the censored or clean versions of albums. I never got to interrogate him as to why they needed to do it, I would have assumed the music would be send to them by the music companies. I always thought it was a bit weird, but neat at the same time.
I have an old security camera system out of a restaurant that was given to me. The air filters on that thing after being in a smokey, greasy environment for years was a nightmare to clean since all the smoke and grease in the filters had a chewing gum like texture.
There was Muzak in an old building I worked in and it was piped throughout the building on 70 volt speakers. Every wire was red to the speakers and I'm sure someone had bootlegged a lot of connections to so many speakers. Same music on 6 floors. It was an old warehouse that was turned into offices.
That kind of engineering doesn't come cheap, but when you need custom hardware that's built to last you have to spend the $$$ to make it happen. My employers used to do custom hardware but everything now runs on COTS Linux boxes. Ditching T1 trunks for SIP was essential. Nobody at the phone company knew anything about T1 anymore anyway... I hear very similar music feeds at several local stores, likely an updated version of this. Whoever is doing it isn't afraid of "name brand" music - I've heard everything from Madonna to Taylor Swift. Sanitized versions, of course. "I'm a real tough kid I can hannndllle it..."
So maybe you can get an SSD drive and try to find a light version of linux and see if you can turn it into a at-home media server? Something you can maybe put VLC on or whatever. IDK. I recently revived a Blue & White G3 tower. I had to buy another case because mine fell while it was in storage. But it's working with 9.22, and 10.4 Tiger (side note, you have to have a browser that works with modern websites because everything is https and has some sort of cert stuff. so I can't even use Safari and apple hasn't supported Tiger or Safari for it in years.) I also found a few Linux distros that aren't too resource hungry. The only real reason I was getting it going again was to be able to use the ADB bus on it for an old ALPS brand keyboard that included a glide point pad thing. I don't care about that as much as the tactile feel of the keyboard. It's not better or worse than my Model M IBM keyboard I use to do my work stuff which involves a lot of typing all day long, it's just different. When I had that computer going in 99- 06 when I got an intel MacMini I just used to love to type with that keyboard for creative endeavors in writing, or poetry, or sending emails to friends or printing out letters and mailing. After I got it all going, but hadn't yet looked for that keyboard in storage, I found a PC version of the ALPS MGL on ebay for a good price and it has the windows key, and came with diskettes as well as adaptors to hook it up to AT or even earlier Mac keyboard port. 2 sep cable heads, one for "mouse" (the glide pad) one for the keyboard. hooked up to the ps/2 to USB adaptor and I can use it on any computer. So I just made my blue and white project a little moot. But I will probably keep messing with it to see which Linux or BSD can run on it. The main issue was the web browser thing. Also, it's pretty slow compared to my 2018 MBP.
9:04 It is actually illegal in the US for manufacturers to deny warranties due to removed stickers. 17:58 It probably was not illegal to play music from your iPod in Taco Bell because you bought the music.
You may have paid for the music on your iPod but it doesn't belong to you. All you paid for is a license to listen to it by yourself or in a non-public place with a few people. Music in public places like Taco Bell requires a public performance license.
That's a cool piece of Commercial history. Be cool to try and resurrect the hard drive and see if it can be saved. I bet my buddy could do something with it, he builds commercial networks and computers for businesses and regular customers so he's always getting drives working or pulling whatever data he can salvage, he's pretty sharp.
Denied the WatchJRJam experience. There was no 🤘🏼’s up or 🕺 to be found… 😢 🔇 #NoUhnTiss Pretty rad, thanks for the share (and for all the content for that matter across the channels). 👍🏼
When I was in high school, I worked retail. We bought the adapter to override one of these systems and put our portable CD player on whenever the store manager wasn't around.
Back in my pizza restaurant management days (90s - early 00s) we were using the satellite Muzak receiver. During opening/closing duties when we were not open, we patched in a CD player or radio to play whatever we wanted. The District Manager kept a blind eye providing we made sure it was off during open hours. Eventually they pulled the metaphorical and literal plug when another store started doing it and damaged some of the speakers.
Really interesting. I always wondered how that worked. I wonder what the rate of music copyright violation is out there, especially with non-chain stores? Very high I suspect. It was amazing how much TH-cam changed when they started cracking down on that. I remember when you had all kinds of good music in videos.
Stupid note: If you were disconnecting whatever you were required to play during business(public facing hours), to play stuff when a store was closed, that was never a big deal. It still isn't. Commercial music license requirements usually were more targeted towards high-volume businesses(restaurants, medium-large retail) where lots of people were going in and out.
We had that exact system at kwik star in 2005ish. One time they added a speaker that wasn't correct which caused the amplifier to get so hot that the musak box on top said hard drive failed
We had one of these at a Dickeys BBQ I worked at many many years ago. I should have taken it with me when we closed. I’m sure it was tossed in the dumpster with the rest of the restaurant.
Meh. This is all stuff LGR, Mat from Techmoan, etc have already covered. Appreciate the new content, but maybe tackle something that nobody else has done... Maybe set up the Heffner mansion with vintage Radio Shack X10 and use the RS232 adapter to automate it? Also my S80 is ready to drive to Kansas if you want it. :)
I love the days where every application needed its own appliance, obviously completely unnecessary for most things these days. I wonder if you could repurpose that chassis for a mini pc or something? Be a shame to see something so well built go to waste.
also for the record the thing about needing to pay licensing fees to play music in a public place is a myth deliberately perpetuated by the record industry. you can just put on the radio and they can't stop you.
No I'm pretty sure I did more than enough here... it's not going to work even if I make the system run, the music is all invalidated, it played the first time I plugged it in 2 years ago, then wiped itself 🤷♂️
There's a text file on the DVD with an end of service date that you can edit to a date in the future, and then burn a new copy of the disc and it will play again.
Can you please try this?
@@DJSubAir I did it with my PlayNetwork Player which is similar to Muzak, and I can confirm, that it does work
This is cool and all, but it does not whip the llama's ass
winamp, WINAMP!
oh gosh. winamp tried to open source their software and they did it horribly. so horribly that they took the entire project down out of embarrassment.
basically just use wacup instead of winamp lmao
It was more out of accidentally sharing multiple proprietary codebases they didn’t have the rights to lol
I thought my boy John gave up on this channel, heck yeah! Glad to see the new videos 👌😉
Same. I’d gladly watch this over new car reviews lol
The "NC" is probably for "Not Connected"
I never thought about with the mono vs stereo in large spaces. Makes complete sense. I've come across a few of these over the years.
Almost everything you hear in the wild from outdoor speakers, to concerts (2ch mono), to distributed audio is mono. It solves so many problems 🍻
We had those at CompUSA before being upgraded to the Satellite streaming system when I was there from 99 to 01 when they were bought out. We would bypass it at night in order to play our own music as well while playing video games on the store systems after closing. Myself and the other tech had to always take care of those.
CompUSA, the greatest computer retail store to ever exist... I think most of my core memories are that place and hunting the rebates with my dad (why does Microcenter suck so much) 😥
@@TechThrowback Yeah, i 100% agree! I still have a lot of the stuff I purchased with my employee discount or that I got nearly free when it was discontinued and when we sold off all the inventory after being sold out. I had a great experience working there as a Tech and then Tech Department Manager when I was just 21-23 years old. The things I saw I’ll never forget. The things people did as well as put on there computers was crazy. I ended up downloading the downloaded music from everyone’s computers that they would spend countless hours downloading from Napster or BeatShare. I had a library of over 10,000 songs lol that I never downloaded from any of the illegal sites lmao.
I even worked on the Apple computer with the Joe Dirt Script on it which was flown in on helicopter which landed in our parking lot. Talked to the director on the phone and he was pissed when we told him it would take 2 days to get his parts in. They had to put production on hold. Later we got a call back from him apologizing and he even invited myself and my other Tech down to become extras in the movie. I still have his hand written note stashed away somewhere. Had one guys laptop with a bullet hole through the screen all because he was watching porn and his wife was pissed off. Still replaced it for free as he had the screen protection warranty.
I ended up going from there to Gateway Country as a Tech as well.
@@TechThrowback I enjoy your channels and content. I worked at CompUSA and currently work at Microcenter for almost 18 years now. I too have nostalgia for CompUSA, but corporate is much better at Microcenter, plus rebates aren't a thing there anymore, they just give the discount. However, I am interested in knowing why you think it sucks. To see the point of view from a customer, especially you, would be nice. Don't hold back as I am fond of both. Also, if you come to my location, which is closest to you, I will make sure you get the care you deserve.
In 2007 our CompUSA closed, during the liquidation time I was tasked with making a music playlist and add the announcements every three songs which was totally a violation of DRM lol. I was told that we were concerned with closing down and not staying open so it doesn't matter. We lost the satellite once we started closing.
@@angrytexan666 We never got to get that far. Our store closed in 01 after the purchase. I had a quit a few stock options and held out during the initial offer thus waiting to the very end getting 2 dollars more per option lol. Being that we were a smaller town when compared to other locations the Grupo Sanborns closed our location much sooner. It couldn’t have come at a more convenient time as Gateway Country had just built a new store just across the street so that became my new home at least until they closed. Gateway was actually an amazing company to work for which worked out but I still missed the whole CompUSA experience and all my trips to the corporate offices in Addison Texas.
My dad has told me about when he worked at a restaurant called Pizza Inn as a teenager and they only had one audio channel hooked to the kitchen speaker... It was always upsetting when Bohemian Rhapsody came over the system because basically half the song was missing
That song is upsetting enough because it was overplayed 25 years ago
JR on the power jack the NC is NOT CONNECTED!
The tale of John Ross and his Taco Bell copyright infringement days.... Saturday 9:00 p.m. on HBO 😂😂😂
once the IA is back online it couldn't hurt to archive the HDD disk image and the CD itself.
We interrupt the k-mart music network for a blue light special. :)
FYI - NC means not connected
Neat, been in IT for many years and never saw one of these! Thanks for the deep dive!
Wow. I remember the days of internet radio in 2000.
The cpu is stated on the spec sheet. It's a Motorola PowerPC, the successor to the 68000 series. The OS is probably a UNIX variation. The PowerPC was used in Apple computers after the early MacIntosh's.
Yep, I was thinking it ran some version of embedded Linux.
Very cool to see inside one of these. I used to work at a Caribou Coffee 20 years ago and they had one of these units. It used the discs to keep up to date. I too unplugged the rcas and hooked up my iPod to play my own music in the cafe 😅
WAIT! Now I don't need to watch JR go. I know where he went!!! TO TECH THROWBACK!
Mood/Muzak is still transmitting via satellite on SES-1 @101w
Am I tripping or is this WatchJRGo? Didn’t know he was so into retro tech lol
Of course it's WatchJRGo!
@@alexandrecouture2462 thought so! I was about to ask if he had a twin who also did TH-cam, will have to binge watch the rest of the videos on this channel later
SWMBO had a salon. Trying to cancel Muzak was like trying to talk to the Kremlin.
You should hook up a laptop or something to the RS-232 port. It might be how they configure it, and may give you some more information.
this is a cool teardown! surprised it had a motorola in there but i guess it's really that old. great video, thanks for making it
Yep; that's a PowerPC based chip.
LOL when I worked at T-mobile...we had a new store built and this was in our server room. I used to disconnect that box and play pandora radio over the speakers. This was back in 2006 -2011. Also it had an output on the back of that box to hook into our phone system to play the hold music from those disks too.
they used to do it over FM transmission when they first started
I used to live in Charlotte NC in the early 2000’s where Muzak was located, and at the time I worked at Media Play, which sold games, books, movies, and CDs. Every so often a Muzak employee would come by the store and buy CDs to be used by Muzak, in particular the censored or clean versions of albums. I never got to interrogate him as to why they needed to do it, I would have assumed the music would be send to them by the music companies. I always thought it was a bit weird, but neat at the same time.
I have an old security camera system out of a restaurant that was given to me. The air filters on that thing after being in a smokey, greasy environment for years was a nightmare to clean since all the smoke and grease in the filters had a chewing gum like texture.
There was Muzak in an old building I worked in and it was piped throughout the building on 70 volt speakers. Every wire was red to the speakers and I'm sure someone had bootlegged a lot of connections to so many speakers. Same music on 6 floors. It was an old warehouse that was turned into offices.
The 50's and 60's record versions are wild. Haven't seen the CD ones before
That kind of engineering doesn't come cheap, but when you need custom hardware that's built to last you have to spend the $$$ to make it happen. My employers used to do custom hardware but everything now runs on COTS Linux boxes. Ditching T1 trunks for SIP was essential. Nobody at the phone company knew anything about T1 anymore anyway...
I hear very similar music feeds at several local stores, likely an updated version of this. Whoever is doing it isn't afraid of "name brand" music - I've heard everything from Madonna to Taylor Swift. Sanitized versions, of course. "I'm a real tough kid I can hannndllle it..."
Anyone else get triggered when JR put the cd on the table face down lol
This desk gets wiped down with glass cleaner 2x per video, every speck of dust shows up on camera (but I totally get your frustration) 😂
@@TechThrowback 😂😂😂😂
So maybe you can get an SSD drive and try to find a light version of linux and see if you can turn it into a at-home media server? Something you can maybe put VLC on or whatever. IDK. I recently revived a Blue & White G3 tower. I had to buy another case because mine fell while it was in storage. But it's working with 9.22, and 10.4 Tiger (side note, you have to have a browser that works with modern websites because everything is https and has some sort of cert stuff. so I can't even use Safari and apple hasn't supported Tiger or Safari for it in years.) I also found a few Linux distros that aren't too resource hungry. The only real reason I was getting it going again was to be able to use the ADB bus on it for an old ALPS brand keyboard that included a glide point pad thing. I don't care about that as much as the tactile feel of the keyboard. It's not better or worse than my Model M IBM keyboard I use to do my work stuff which involves a lot of typing all day long, it's just different. When I had that computer going in 99- 06 when I got an intel MacMini I just used to love to type with that keyboard for creative endeavors in writing, or poetry, or sending emails to friends or printing out letters and mailing. After I got it all going, but hadn't yet looked for that keyboard in storage, I found a PC version of the ALPS MGL on ebay for a good price and it has the windows key, and came with diskettes as well as adaptors to hook it up to AT or even earlier Mac keyboard port. 2 sep cable heads, one for "mouse" (the glide pad) one for the keyboard. hooked up to the ps/2 to USB adaptor and I can use it on any computer. So I just made my blue and white project a little moot. But I will probably keep messing with it to see which Linux or BSD can run on it. The main issue was the web browser thing. Also, it's pretty slow compared to my 2018 MBP.
9:04 It is actually illegal in the US for manufacturers to deny warranties due to removed stickers. 17:58 It probably was not illegal to play music from your iPod in Taco Bell because you bought the music.
You may have paid for the music on your iPod but it doesn't belong to you. All you paid for is a license to listen to it by yourself or in a non-public place with a few people. Music in public places like Taco Bell requires a public performance license.
@@JacGoudsmit That is a valid point!
The CM on the disk stands for the model of the player
Motorola QUICC chips! We had them in the smaller Wellfleet/Bay Networks routers! Hadn't heard QUICC for years!
That's a cool piece of Commercial history. Be cool to try and resurrect the hard drive and see if it can be saved. I bet my buddy could do something with it, he builds commercial networks and computers for businesses and regular customers so he's always getting drives working or pulling whatever data he can salvage, he's pretty sharp.
Denied the WatchJRJam experience. There was no 🤘🏼’s up or 🕺 to be found… 😢 🔇 #NoUhnTiss
Pretty rad, thanks for the share (and for all the content for that matter across the channels). 👍🏼
When I was in high school, I worked retail. We bought the adapter to override one of these systems and put our portable CD player on whenever the store manager wasn't around.
I would be astounded if that "300-256" chip isn't NOR Flash (I would suspect 256 megabits) for storing the system's firmware and/or embedded OS.
Back in my pizza restaurant management days (90s - early 00s) we were using the satellite Muzak receiver. During opening/closing duties when we were not open, we patched in a CD player or radio to play whatever we wanted. The District Manager kept a blind eye providing we made sure it was off during open hours. Eventually they pulled the metaphorical and literal plug when another store started doing it and damaged some of the speakers.
Is this an episode of little guys?
That's a nice case that it's in. If I could find one for around $20, I'd buy it just for that.
You having worked at Taco Bell makes so much sense somehow
Really interesting. I always wondered how that worked. I wonder what the rate of music copyright violation is out there, especially with non-chain stores? Very high I suspect. It was amazing how much TH-cam changed when they started cracking down on that. I remember when you had all kinds of good music in videos.
our muzak unit was tape.
Stupid note: If you were disconnecting whatever you were required to play during business(public facing hours), to play stuff when a store was closed, that was never a big deal.
It still isn't. Commercial music license requirements usually were more targeted towards high-volume businesses(restaurants, medium-large retail) where lots of people were going in and out.
Would be cool to see you set up some dial up internet!
I really need a dial up setup 💯
We had that exact system at kwik star in 2005ish. One time they added a speaker that wasn't correct which caused the amplifier to get so hot that the musak box on top said hard drive failed
Console access via serial and you can probably see the current errors and why it's rebooting.
Maybe the drive can be saved if its repaired, if the discs aren't scratched or damaged hopefully
Welcome to the history of distractions . . .
Have collected a few over the years. Not sure what I'll do with them. lmao
I mean if i own the music i could make my own playlist.
We had one of these at a Dickeys BBQ I worked at many many years ago. I should have taken it with me when we closed. I’m sure it was tossed in the dumpster with the rest of the restaurant.
Meh. This is all stuff LGR, Mat from Techmoan, etc have already covered. Appreciate the new content, but maybe tackle something that nobody else has done... Maybe set up the Heffner mansion with vintage Radio Shack X10 and use the RS232 adapter to automate it?
Also my S80 is ready to drive to Kansas if you want it. :)
they don't look like that anymore. Nowadays, they're just a android device the plugs in the network.
Oh I know, I've seen the new one, and have one generation newer than this... but this channel is for old stuff 🍻
Mmm... Taco Bell.
you could have tested the hard drive with crystal disk
Where is the link for your tech store i knowwww you selling some of that stuff!
Eh, so far none of it is for sale so I can go back and make shorts... but maybe one day I'll sell a little of the collection 😳
Where is even that room? The house isn't done yet. There is no space in the barn garage. Where is it I am so confused.
Anyone else want to see jr and jays2cents do a video together? Either a var or tech video
Gonna hook it up in the new house ?? you have plenty of speakers...
I love the days where every application needed its own appliance, obviously completely unnecessary for most things these days. I wonder if you could repurpose that chassis for a mini pc or something? Be a shame to see something so well built go to waste.
Can I use for my twitch streams then?
NC means Not Connected...
not my favorite stores. thise all play seeburg records of muzak
is this a little guy?
also for the record the thing about needing to pay licensing fees to play music in a public place is a myth deliberately perpetuated by the record industry. you can just put on the radio and they can't stop you.
CRD would be proud 💯
Hey
you give up so easily
No I'm pretty sure I did more than enough here... it's not going to work even if I make the system run, the music is all invalidated, it played the first time I plugged it in 2 years ago, then wiped itself 🤷♂️
Moist
🍑💨