My mate's parents owned a slightly fancy chinese restaurant, and lived above it. We used to play Dreamcast up there, beg the cooks to give us spring rolls from the kitchen, and watch customers on the cctv. His parents left him in charge of the bgm playlist (a laptop with itunes... definitely didnt pay for licensing) and he added loads of Aphex Twin to it, which they ended up loving! Good times.
@DJ_InYourFace Yes, mostly, but Windowlicker was definitely on at at some point, haha. They only played the music very quietly so it could pass you by unless you focused on it
Years ago I worked for a company that installed BGM systems. As early as 1999 they were using satellite systems and we mainly installed them in large retail chain stores. It was just a tower PC running custom windows software with a satellite receiver card connected to a dish and a sound card connected to the PA system. Specific chain stores would have custom announcements about sales, current specials, etc interspersed between the music. It really was plug and play and completely automated and once installed, the store staff never had to touch the system.
A more primitive solution was just to have a dedicated satellite radio station and have standard-ish satellite receivers picking it up in store - Sky themselves offered this as a service at one point; ASDA FM and Little Chef Radio were findable if you wanted such a thing through a standard Sky box's 'Other Channels' menu.
The strangest one was in Toronto and it just used a dedicated phone line connected through a transformer to the sound system, called wired for sound. I think you had to be close to the source that was downtown as well.
@@williamsquires8010 A lot of FM radio stations also offer this, using the SCA channel allocation in the FM baseband, which puts extra audio carriers in the FM transmitter output. Low bandwidth, but good enough to carry a few different store channels along with the regular stereo FM broadcast. Of course a lot of the larger chains went to having their own store channel, some with an actual "live" DJ, and those typically either are sent using a digital satellite receiver that is locked to get that particular multiplex, or distributed via a CDN online.
@@oambrosia Yes especially with stations that are part of a large group, where they just have a playlist, and the automation simply runs through the list, inserting the "local" ads in, along with all the national ones. The kind of station that you will hear at multiple points on the dial, only difference is the on the hour station ID they have to announce.
@@Alabaster335 Moscow/SPB radio Maximum (I believe it based on some US license) had this policy. I used to listen it on my first job because our chief listened to it. Hard rotation of latest hits, produces nothing but my hatred to probably not bad music.
As someone who has worked in a supermarket in late 1990's - early 2000's I confirm that the random order of playing music as well as a larger library of songs to play from are extremely important for the sanity of people working in such jobs. Just imagine that every single day for 10-12 hours straight you'll be hearing the same 3 hours of music on repeat in the same god damn order. I can't stress enough that after a couple of weeks this becomes the soundtrack of your life that haunts you with it's repetiveness and slowly but surely kills your soul in the process. 🤣
I used to work in a Jobcentre and we had muzak playing constantly. Muzak versions of songs that were supposed to have a calming effect on our clients. They certainly didn't have a calming influence on me! At Christmas we had muzak Christmas songs, on a loop, for two weeks. After the first week I told my boss that if they didn't take them off I would probably kill someone. They switched it off!
I worked for a well known Swedish furniture retailer and when you called through to speak to another department it always played the same songs in the same order. Maddening!
We had CDs that we’d play on loop in the media section of Best Buy in 2005. It had a “DJ” on it who said it was “Best Buy Radio” making it sound like it was a live radio station feed to our customers. I don’t know how many times I got to hear the same songs over and over. Thankfully I only worked there part-time and for a short while. I still can’t listen to Gold Digger by Kanye West to this day because of it…among other reasons. 😅
Heh, I worked at a grocery store a lifetime ago, probably something like 21 years now, and it also had one of those "short list" of eternal background music. In particular, "A Thousand Miles" is permanently burned into my brain with working that job. Whenever I hear it, I just see myself stocking shelves in that miserable and dirty store.
AMC Theaters between 2004 and 2008, the BGM Cds looped every 20-25 minutes, because it was determined that was more than enough time for a guest to buy their ticket and start their movie. It was so mind numbing for most employees. I say "most" because I had the pleasure of getting to work as a projectionist, away from the BGM.
I worked in a diy store part time in the 70s. The background music system always played faster beat ‘hurry-up’ music in the last 15 minutes or so before closing time. Apparently it encouraged shoppers to make their final purchases and make their way to the checkouts.
Where I currently work, the music just turns off 10 minutes before closing time. I think it helps set the "We are now closed and you should not be here anymore" vibe
I'm surprised it's not running an ARM system-on-chip. That Vortex86 part is an odd one, basically a very fast 486 workalike. It shows up a lot in weird embedded systems running weird legacy software.
It looks like the DX3 version is more like an i686 since it supports USB2, SATA, PCIE, and DDR3. It's also dual core and I'm not aware of any dual-core 486s.
I have a couple small 5.7" touchscreen computers based around the Vortex86 CPU, and they're fun little things, lacking ACPI and having a physical power switch brings up a neat little feature in WindowsXP though, when you shut it down, XP actually gives you that classic message "It is now safe for you to turn off your computer." when it's all done, a nice bit of geeky nostalgia... :D
Consumer products vs something like this are different worlds. The cost of the box doesn't become such an issue as they're not shipping millions. Ease of support and development will be their priority.
I work in a large chain of small clothing stores. Our BGM system is actually CD-based in some way. Every so often, we're sent a CD that we simply throw into a player to update. It doesn't play *from* the CD, but rather seems to download the music and play on its own.
That sounds so back to front, I mean you can keep literal months of music on an optical disk, why not just have the music on the disk encrypted with a key that your BGM device downloads from the service to unlock?
@@Mostlyharmless1985 Because a 700M collection of MP3, compressed at 64k, is a really large number of songs, and with a file containing a playlist the player interprets and uses after the files are copied off, no need to use any bandwidth, plus they save on needing ot have a high bandwidth CDN server for the stores. After all, a $1 CD and $2 for the courier fee to the store, giving the store the ability to play even without Internet, is a big bonus. Especially for smaller stores, where they might, by location, have really poor service otherwise, and keeping the limited bandwidth for POS transactions is more important. Plenty of stores where the POS runs off SIM cards from a carrier, and there is only mobile data available there for some reason or the other.
@@vordan7111that doesn't really track, MTBF for just about every optical drive I've encountered in my lifetime borders on decades. It's a servo motor and a laser diode. It's hardly Edison's talking machine. It also doesn't make sense to send optical discs to subscribers if they download the music to the machine because you should be able to do that with various authentication protocols.
That little box while sterile on the outside contains contains OCEANS of ingenuity. Over the decades, thousands of man-years have been poured into developing the hardware and the software to the point where you just plug it in and it starts playing.
It's not as difficult as you might think. Around 20 years ago I built a little Linux machine out of leftover parts which would just start playing random music off whatever zip disk was inserted in the drive. I put this together for my brother for use in his car (and set it up with a read-only filesystem so that power interruptions wouldn't be a problem), and it was a simple evening project.
[5:52] Stepping through the video frames I see that the SD card is mounted as an EXT4 filesystem. This is a linux filesystem. You can probably copy the SD card if you block-level copy it; on linux I would use the "dd" command to do that. Anyway, thank you for your videos, they are always worthwhile!
I know those things! A few months back I had to help transferring the IT gear for a popular kitchenware chain in Australia to another store. While all I needed to do was their computer system, there was another guy there for the sound system and bits and pieces that fell out of our contract. One of them was this sound system. He needed to buy an adapter so it’d play in their store speakers which was installed years before they moved in.. I hung around and helped the kid cause he was young and had no idea, he came from a world where everything is hdmi or Bluetooth
Retrotech nerd here. DM&P is what's left of ALi/ULi back in the day (i.e., the 90s), and the Vortex86 chip is... interesting. It's basically a 1st Gen Pentium by way of what's called 'architecture' (the way the chip works) -- but, it doesn't implement a particular instruction ("CMOV", Conditional Move), at the binary/"assembly language" (the actual instructions the chip itself knows) that, while _technically_ optional within the 5x86 spec, in practice is the difference between a 486 CPU and a 586 (Pentium 1) CPU. This effectively makes it, functionally, a 486 that implements a bunch of 586 instructions but isn't really a proper 586 -- sort of like how the NEC V20 and V30, a decade or so earlier, implemented the 80186/80188 instruction set on top of the 8086/8088 set and basically acted as much better 8086/8088 CPUs than the original. The Vortex86 design is actually at least the third generation of this particular CPU design, as well -- its predecessor was the SiS 550, back when Silicon Integrated Systems was even vaguely relevant in the PC world. As far as I can tell, while they still exist, they haven't done anything since 2007, and the last half-decade-or-so up to that point they had moved away from CPUs and chipsets entirely, and were focusing on... touch panel controllers for LCD touchscreens. (Pffft.) For what it's worth, the Vortex86 started as a special variant of the SIS55x series (yes, it was a series), integrating Smart Card and MMC/Memory Stick controllers, which ran at 166MHz and was called the M6217D. DM&P at the time was actually Jan Yin Chan Electronics Co LTD, out of Taiwan... eventually they swallowed up other companies to become DM&P Group. However, the SiS55x design did NOT originate with that company... they actually bought it, along with the rest of the company that created it, when they acquired Rise Technology in 1999. Rise had been formed in 1993, and produced the mP6 CPU, which doesn't appear to be well-documented, but from what information I can find, appears to be an independent implementation of the 5x86 design (i.e., not licensed from Intel, but designed in-house to act identically, outwardly, even though the ground-up design internal to the chip is entirely different). It implements the Pentium MMX version of things, but Rise unfortunately took so long to develop the chip that by the time it was _finally_ released in 1998, the market it was designed for was essentially dead and gone -- the second generation of Pentium-class chips (Pentium II and AMD K7 / early Athlon/Duron/etc) were already out. Despite their best efforts, Rise just couldn't compete in the big leagues, and SiS snapped them up not long after. Systems like this EBox PC are actually kind of sought after in the retrotech community by people who want a relatively-simple-to-set-up-and-run "nostalgia box" for later DOS and pre-XP Windows games. Something like this would run most adventure games from the era (back when they really were a thing) quite well... not sure about something like Quake, but since you can run DOOM on a friggin HP printer as long as it has a screen somewhere, _that_ shouldn't be an issue... basically this is the equivalent of a _seriously_ hopped-up, hot-rodded 486 from about the mid-90s, that can play most games from about five years before and through about five years after, give-or-take. It's usually fairly simple, relatively speaking, to get Windows 98 or 2000 running on one of these, with full hardware support, and only the hardcore purists will care that, for example, Sound Blaster audio is emulated, rather than being an actual hardware implementation -- but, this sort of thing isn't for such folks anyways. Now you know.
Similar to the Music on Hold systems for phone systems, those used to make you think you were hearing things as they had little speakers in them so if you were working in a server room with one plugged into a phone system you would keep hearing voices faintly in the background, even when the place was empty used to freak a few people out for a while till they got used to them
I worked at one of the original "theme" restaurants and besides music we played video clips and they were all on a huge (big as a old school jukebox ) Laser disc multi disc player for both the music and video if I remember maybe 50 laser discs and every month we would get new ones to replace the film trailers of upcoming films. The DJ booth also had top of the line CD players with pitch control and 2 Technic 1200 turntables and Urei Mixers. It was an amazing set up for the late 90s
We had an Imagesound player back when I worked at DW Sports. Everything was delivered by the network connection. We'd periodically get updates but on the whole it was the same mind numbing royalty free music you can still hear in Poundland/B&M/The Range now.
@@keithsquawk I'm not surprised. Imagesound also supply the music for McDonald's and their playlists are fantastic - genuinely better than most radio stations. It's all down to how much companies are willing to shell out.
I've worked a bit with the video equivalent of these type of devices, often referred to as "digital signage". They can be nothing more than slide shows without audio, or video with audio presentations as were done with VCRs in the past. At the higher end are ones used for electronic menus at fast food restaurants and such. They're basically a more powerful version of the box demonstrated here, and are closer to a "real" or general purpose computer. They tend to be built to avoid noisy fans, although smaller quiet ones are used, too. Thanks for the video, Mat!
I'm sure it's changed by now, but the digital signage systems I worked with were bog-standard mITX x86-64, usually Intel CPUs and motherboards, in OnLogic M350 or MC500 cases. The real expense, of course, was the HDBaseT and up-link equipment. $70,000+ rack to connect and distribute from a $500 PC to a bunch of $300 TVs. 😂
@@Azlehria I'm sure there were/are both generic PCs in various smaller form factors as well as more specifically designed units being used for digital signage and related purposes. The most recent ones I've seen were just Dell ultra-small FF units being used in an office environment.
Not sure which system my old work used to have but you could tell which manager was on shift by the genre of music they'd switch the system to. If more than one was there they'd keep going back and changing between genres. It was kind of funny hearing it suddenly cut to another song throughout the day. A bit of a musical battle of sorts between my managers.
I was installing the server rack (Refrigerator sized computer) for a brand new store opening up. As part of that was included a background music player. Young people bringing in the merchandise were having a bit of an argument about the existence of a song; The Hokey Pokey. I said that it was an actual song and I'll play it for you. I pulled it up, patched it and a microphone (from the mic port on the device) into the public address system. Announcing throughout the entire store about the argument in the back and by special request, We shall be pleased to hear; The Hokey Pokey.
Speaking of "Just get a Raspberry Pi", I was long wanting something like Mat's Sony digital music player, but they are not cheap. We did look at a "Brennan B3" but it doesn't connect to the amplifier without a separate DAC, so you'd end up with loads of extra cables and power supplies So end of 2023, I put together a Raspberry Pi, attached DAC on a board (HAT connector), flashed a distro/player called MoOde Audio and added a stick of music. Great fun, now I can not only play though the speakers, but I can get that background music effect throughout the flat, controlled from a web front end I take Matt's point though. Handy as it is, it does not have the delight of a record player the size of his Bob dishwasher doing its thing
@gabest4 Well, it's done now. If I want to do it again then I can look at the ESP32. With this I have a touchscreen UI for anyone else that wants to use it just as a normal appliance, not fart around using the web interface of streaming to VLC or the like (or even a port on a browser) If I am doing that again, I will see if the ESP32 has the fuctionality, with whatever boards it needs, though when I had a quick look, my solution is still cheaper as I did not need to buy a 3D printer to make a case :D
On a side note for a BGM fail: my place of work played BGM music from a PC BUT when installed, only had a limited number of tracks. These went round in a loop and, eventually, started driving staff potty. Took forever (years) to get any movement on changing the music from IT. Why? Person who knew login details had left the company. Eventually, we had a new system installed. Still centrally controlled (frustratingly) but at least it seems someone knows the login details now! 😂
The flip side of that was a bar that I used to go to in the 90's, it automatically DJ'd the music by controlling two cd jukebox's, the music was always great and appropriate for the time of day, until the day it wasn't...when the staff got the password
Somewhere I used to work they had Lighthouse Family's Ocean Drive album on, for two years straight. That was the best part of twenty years ago and it's only recently I've been able to enjoy their music again.
5:45 - 1ghz CPU and 960mb RAM - should be able to handle it with ease. A few seconds later you see it has a SliTaz Linux Kernel - would be trivial for someome in the know* to get a Linux port of Doom on it 😁 *not me! 😂
Nice recap, I loved the added bits from the previous version, it explains quite a lot of its overall funcionality and quirks, unfortunately it's quite limited even for a MicroPC
Such a cool little device. I find the background music players to be an interesting niche. Using a tiny little system on a chip with hardly any moving parts seems like the ultimate evolution.
I worked at Toys "R" Us back around 2001-2005, and their BGM was a cassette tape that ran about 4 hours before repeating. That wasn't too bad. Yes, it got a bit repetitive by the time the next tape arrived; tapes were changed monthly. The Christmas ('04?) tapes arrived at the end of October, to start November 1. Two tapes, swapped weekly, to take us to New Year's. Of course, they lost the second tape immediately.
I didn't work on BGM for TRU, but when I did service work for them about 10 years ago I once ran across a _previous_ incarnation of that system, possibly from the location's previous life as a Sears. It had been abandoned along with all the other equipment in that wiring closet, locked away in the similarly-abandoned basement, and surrounded by piles upon piles of cassettes with a thick layer of dust on everything. I still regret not taking some of them with me, as the earliest label I remembered was scheduled for July of '81. The tape in the deck was from sometime in '93. It still fascinates me that Wi-Fi installs, which weren't critical line-of-business equipment, were an overnight lock-in; while POS installs, which _are_ critical, had start times as late as 8 AM. Yet we were required to have the store use _only_ the new systems, even if it delayed opening. Still doesn't make sense.
I remember the supermarket I worked at in the late 90s had dual tape decks and new tapes sent out monthly. Once a tape came in that actually had 3-4 goods songs in a row (o.k. 2 great songs and 2 so-so ones). Anytime I was going past the system office and no one was around to tell me not to, I'd cue up the good songs and cut to them at the end of the current song. On the way back to my department, I'd get a nod of approval from those other workers, who knew it hadn't been 4 hours since hearing those songs.
funnily enough, the eBox is a regular off-the-shelf thin client PC, and a rather neat one at that. those BGM players might be worth grabbing one for the hardware alone.
@@Techmoan Years ago, these mini pcs were used for robotics projects before the raspberry pi even existed. We used them in university. I've still got one, made by ebox.
@@CptJistuce No, but those boards typically only are going to support at best 1024 by 768 video, and most will only do 640 by 480 generally, so they likely laso only support 8 bit colour as well, because most of the time they are doing CGA emulation.
@@SeanBZAtypo? CGA isn't 8-bit colour, and why would it be using that? also, this particular device clearly supports at least 16-bit colour, judging by the way ubuntu looked on it
If you can get hand of a "Yehova's Witnesses Phonograph" from around 1940 you should make a review about that: Probably the first vertical record player, fully mechanical (for 78s), but using a paper cone like in a loudspeaker with the needle connected to it, which gives it a very good sound quality. Technically really genius.
Really interesting to see the evolution between this version of the video and the first one. I actually enjoyed the first one, but this is so much better!
Cold as this piece of tech may be, this video was a really nice way to round out the exploration into the different background music systems you've reviewed in the past. Gives some nice context, and additional appreciation of the clever techniques the older systems had to come up with for continuous play.
In the 90's we build a 486PC with a sound blaster card and winamp. We had the salespeople create short messages, then 'acquired' short pieces of soft-rock music to play. We built a playlist and set it to play randomized. Much later I had to program a bunch of USB based players for MOH. We subscribed to a service to record the music and voice recordings.
Thanks for this! I detect a slight hesitancy to embrace the tech, but do really appreciate seeing your take on something different even if it’s newfandangled and doesn’t break one’s back lifting it… 😊
Thank you Mat for showing us this mini computer background music system. Yes, some of the older systems has their appeal, but I found a personal computer filled with ripped CD's and MP3 files with a sound player software capable of random song selection, the more ideal background music system. Your DJs for dance or wedding parties use PCs.
5:52 It says "EXT4-fs (sda1): mounting ext3 file system using the ext4 subsystem". So you couldn't read the card because it uses ext3, something neither macOS nor Windows supports out of the box. You can use third party software like Paragon extFS which is available for both Windows and Mac. Or just boot into Linux as you did.
We the same company at work and it's pretty good. I can't remember ever hearing the same song twice in the same day and the repeats I can recall have been days apart. I also like how they play a few songs from one genre then move to another. They even do that during Christmas so with the exception of Christmas Eve (and even then I don't recall hearing a repeat) there was never more than a few songs in a row. (I love Christmas music but I loathe hearing the same 20 songs everywhere I go!)
I think Nobles is possibly the Noble Organisation, formerly a UK operator of amusement/slot machine gambling venues under a varied range of brands. They are now part of Astra Gaming.
Having songs play in a random order and having new songs randomly rotated in would be great for those working in retail! For several months in 1997 I worked at a Best Buy where their BGM system consisted of a Pioneer 6 disc CD changer attached to a multi-room capable AV receiver which pumped the audio to the overhead speakers throughout the store. The audio system was attached to a timer that would power it from 10am to 9pm which were the store hours M-Sat. It played the same 6 CDs in the same order on repeat every day and the CDs were only changed once per quarter. I was on the "merchandise" team who basically stocked all the shelves, were generally in store from 6am-10am every day and 6am-12pm on Sundays. We always knew exactly when it was 10am as the same song would start playing every day and we always had to listen to 2 hours of the same songs every Sunday morning as the store didn't open until noon on Sundays at that time. My next job after that was managing a used CD store where the clerks could pick out what the house CD changer would play which was awesome in comparison!
I did something like that for a jukebox for my desk at work for while. We used a Muzak system for the waiting rooms and hallways that got its playback from FM subcarriers. Anyway, as always thanks for sharing this!
I recently worked in a mall restaurant for 6 months. The bgm inside the restaurant consisted in a 30 minutes loop of advertisements for the chain on a big tv in the entrance. It was quite loud and we couldn't change the volume. The loop got changed every two months when they send us a new DVD. My boss told me it has been the same system for at least 10 years and they said it would be too expensive to change it now because we have about 90 stores around the country. Outside the restaurant, a loop of music also played in the mall. I've counted no more than 12 tracks changing every month. In August, we got the entire OST of the movie Barbie for some reason.
We have a Stingray box at my store and it we get streamed the same hundred or so songs every day. It turns into a form of psychological torture to keep hearing the same songs every day. I guess they subscribe to 'play it until you hate it' mantra. It's honestly baffling that it works like this, because it is a streaming service. Maybe my company is too cheap to pay for more music, which seems likely. It does have a line in that overrides it, and you can plug a phone or an MP3 player into it, and when I worked over nights, that's what I'd do. You can only hear 'Jump' by Chris Cross so many times, before you never want to hear it again.
A Papa Johns in my neighborhood had a similar device, but for some reason it wasn't password protected, one of the employees one day replaced the playlist of songs with a 10hr loop of the Spiderman Pizza music 😂😂😂
Christ, the sole thought of unshuffled BGM gives me anxiety and some depressing flashbacks: back in August 2017 I worked at a hotel and they definitely had some kind of 24 hour long playlist cause you could tell time by whichever song came on (I remember Kinobe's instrumental of "slip into something more comfortable" meant it's 16:08). I'm sure it annoyed other colleagues too but those in charge were never forced to listen to the song for 8-12 hours and couldn't care less. Shame, cause I'm certain in 2017 the BGM system was definitely digital. Half-assed BGM solutions are enough of a reason to never work in retail, customer service etc
I'd be super interested to see an image dump of the SD card, just to see what sorts of player engine it uses and how easy it might be to decrypt that data partition. I'm guessing that the encryption in place isn't all that secure, especially since the device needs to be able to decrypt it in some way. I wouldn't be surprised if the decryption key is just stored in the fstab.
But is there any encryption at all? At boot time second partition is just ext3 fs. It maybe corrupted and thus refusing to mount. EXT3 does not support full fs encryption, its usually done by block device mapper like LUKS. I doubt service owner bothered to modify ext3 drivers to support any sort of encryption considering how lousy their device is - you can see its loads XFS, NFS, wireless drivers.. Its Slitaz with minimal modifications. I would like how data partition is mount in fstab too, since system partition mounts just fine.
If I were running a business, I'd probably go the 'cheap ass' route, and set up a free version with public domain and royalty free music. I mean, people don't generally pay much attention to the BGM at a store as it is, so just find pleasant enough older tunes and you're good. It might be a different story if we're talking about a trendy place, but who knows with trends? I could totally see trendy types deciding that a place that a place that only plays music from ~100 years ago mixed with modern 'unknown artists' is 'lit' or whatever it is kids these days say.
Cool device. I've actually set up a very similar "radio station" system for my family to use, with a random selection of a couple of thousand tracks, all ripped from my CD collection. Great sound, one button operation, and it won't become obsolete when Spotify et al. change their APIs.
Great video but it's still weird to hear techmoan saying words like ddr3 and 1GHZ Intel something or other. I like words like gears, sprockets and "bits and bobs" more hahaha
Ha! I have one of those old boxes. I used to work for the company that supplied them and the system before ImageSound acquired it a few years ago. We also provided a version of the system which was essentially just two fairly decent speakers with an SD card mp3 player in the back. We provided a way for people to sync-up their playlists onto the card since the speakers weren't online. Sometimes we even just posted freshly synced SD cards to the premises! Old school!
On the topic of "Oh just get a raspberry pi" I wanted to build a BGM machine for my office to help mask the air conditioner vent's ticking noise. A pair of cheap (but decent) bookshelf speakers, a dac/amp combo unit, and a raspberry pi 4 did the job for me. First, I set up a library in my Plex server for bgm. I threw in some video game music, TV and movie soundtracks (just the bgm, though, none of the music with lyrics), and some symphonic and orchestral works. Just enough to keep me interested without distracting from my job. Then, I installed the headless Plexamp image on the pi, got it all configured, and pointed it at my BGM library. Occasionally, I refresh the library by adding to it, but I don't usually take anything out. If I do another project along these lines, I'd do something like a Mycroft pi connected to a mic array and speakers so that it can do more than just bgm. That would just be an at-home project, though. I don't need a smart speaker at work, and I don't want to deal with the potential privacy concerns with student PII - even if I use a private assistant like Mycroft.
Such a fascinating little computer. It seems it's based on old 486 chips but significantly modernized. Dual core, 1ghz. I would never have thought I'd see a dual core 486 much less a 486 at 1Ghz! Very slick.
When I was in high-school I worked as a waiter at a Mexican themed nigh-club / restaurant. They played the same 5 CD's over and over, every night. Staff would leave because they simply couldn't stomach the music not even one more time. One staff member climbed over the counter, grabbed the 5 disc changer and smashed it against the floor before leaving. They repaired the CD changer and it was back to the same 5 CD's over and over and over and over again.
It was nice to see this. Even if this isn't in itself as interesting as the older stuff where they had to work within more limitations it's still interesting to see something that most people wouldn't have much dealings with, see how much things have moved on and put the older stuff in perspective.
Devices such as these are also commonly used on telephone systems, as a 'Music On-Hold System', where customers will hear music & directed advertisements, when placed in a holding queue, rather than just hearing silence. I've seen these used in banks, hospitals, real estate brokers, etc... As for uniqueness, they're pretty straight forward. Compared to the Seaberg BMS, the newer devices are a glorified MP3 Player.
It’s funny how “just use a Raspberry Pi” is more or less what the BGM companies are doing now. A 486-core SBC instead of an ARM core, but still. It’s even using the built-in DAC and amp!
For a few years I was a state representative here in the US for ASCAP - the music rights society responsible for collecting licensing fees and distributing funds to songwriters. But, that was before fancy digital audio files were a thing. Every retail store, bar and venue hated seeing me walk through the door as it meant I was there to either collect money or advance the stages of a lawsuit for public performances of copyrighted music. It is my understanding that these new digital systems pay all licensing fees to ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and other such organizations and then “pass the savings” onto subscribers. So much has changed yet so much stays the same.
The little NUC is a perfect device for this background music task.But I totally agree with you, I prefer the ingenuity of the classic analogue hardware tape or disc players. They were so much more interesting. Like a modern day smart phone, you can do everything with an app and software, but the old ways were so interesting and clever.
Wow, so compact! I frequented a department store in the 1970s-80s that used reel to reel tape for their store music. I was shocked one day to hear the Muzak version of "Hell is For Children" played. Gotta love it!
My place of work still uses analog based receivers for their BGM, tuned to a publicly available FM signal at all their nearly 104 locations. There's literally nothing stopping anyone from walking in with a fairly decent FM transmitter and overriding the signal. XD
I work in a Salon and we have these. It's a service called Retail Radio and has a few commercials from us and I believe downloads current music from online.
A few years ago, i went to a local small restaurant that had an interesting (not really) BGM...an actual latop on a stand, hooked up to a speaker system, running windows and with TH-cam on. Brilliant!...but then again, it was a very small restaurant.
Used to work at a Dutch company that makes this kind of things, was the main software engineer on their systems. A lot of things sounds familiar :). Mostly Linux based (although we had Windows software that worked as a streaming service, see it as Spotify B2B) and multi levels of encryption. Our music collections were FAT though, and all the files were encrypted. Also, all the harddrives were interchangeable between clients. So depending on your subscription, the player would play certain lists / programmes. But every programme we had was on the large 250gb disk that was in every machine. That way the disks were 'universal' and if it broke, it was an easy replacement for a tech, sales rep, or even customer who wanted to use a screwdriver themselves.
Having worked at Target for almost 2 years I can confidently say that I heard MANY repeat songs, especially "I feel love" by sam smith, a sped up recording of mr. blue sky, and a piano cover of hey ya.
My mate's parents owned a slightly fancy chinese restaurant, and lived above it. We used to play Dreamcast up there, beg the cooks to give us spring rolls from the kitchen, and watch customers on the cctv. His parents left him in charge of the bgm playlist (a laptop with itunes... definitely didnt pay for licensing) and he added loads of Aphex Twin to it, which they ended up loving! Good times.
I'm guessing more tracks from Selected Ambient Works Vol. II than the Come To Daddy EP ?
@DJ_InYourFace Yes, mostly, but Windowlicker was definitely on at at some point, haha. They only played the music very quietly so it could pass you by unless you focused on it
@@DJ_InYourFace I have a memory of hearing Xtal play inside a Kmart... lol
Thank you for sharing this memory, it's beautiful!
I'm imagining eating a nice egg fried rice while Come To Daddy or Windowlicker is blasting out of the speakers! 😧
Years ago I worked for a company that installed BGM systems. As early as 1999 they were using satellite systems and we mainly installed them in large retail chain stores. It was just a tower PC running custom windows software with a satellite receiver card connected to a dish and a sound card connected to the PA system. Specific chain stores would have custom announcements about sales, current specials, etc interspersed between the music. It really was plug and play and completely automated and once installed, the store staff never had to touch the system.
A more primitive solution was just to have a dedicated satellite radio station and have standard-ish satellite receivers picking it up in store - Sky themselves offered this as a service at one point; ASDA FM and Little Chef Radio were findable if you wanted such a thing through a standard Sky box's 'Other Channels' menu.
Mood Music is still doing Satellite Service and IP based devices
The strangest one was in Toronto and it just used a dedicated phone line connected through a transformer to the sound system, called wired for sound. I think you had to be close to the source that was downtown as well.
The "running Windows software" is probably the scariest part.
@@williamsquires8010 A lot of FM radio stations also offer this, using the SCA channel allocation in the FM baseband, which puts extra audio carriers in the FM transmitter output. Low bandwidth, but good enough to carry a few different store channels along with the regular stereo FM broadcast. Of course a lot of the larger chains went to having their own store channel, some with an actual "live" DJ, and those typically either are sent using a digital satellite receiver that is locked to get that particular multiplex, or distributed via a CDN online.
If I was stuck on a cruise ship and they had one CD playing over and over, I'd probably jump off the ship. Thanks Mat.
Dominika-nika-nika =)
One of our local radio stations does exactly that, just plays the same songs on shuffle every day, some sort of Top Hits CD.
@@Alabaster335 this is pretty common in the US...sadly.
@@oambrosia Yes especially with stations that are part of a large group, where they just have a playlist, and the automation simply runs through the list, inserting the "local" ads in, along with all the national ones. The kind of station that you will hear at multiple points on the dial, only difference is the on the hour station ID they have to announce.
@@Alabaster335 Moscow/SPB radio Maximum (I believe it based on some US license) had this policy. I used to listen it on my first job because our chief listened to it. Hard rotation of latest hits, produces nothing but my hatred to probably not bad music.
As someone who has worked in a supermarket in late 1990's - early 2000's I confirm that the random order of playing music as well as a larger library of songs to play from are extremely important for the sanity of people working in such jobs. Just imagine that every single day for 10-12 hours straight you'll be hearing the same 3 hours of music on repeat in the same god damn order. I can't stress enough that after a couple of weeks this becomes the soundtrack of your life that haunts you with it's repetiveness and slowly but surely kills your soul in the process. 🤣
I used to work in a Jobcentre and we had muzak playing constantly. Muzak versions of songs that were supposed to have a calming effect on our clients. They certainly didn't have a calming influence on me! At Christmas we had muzak Christmas songs, on a loop, for two weeks. After the first week I told my boss that if they didn't take them off I would probably kill someone. They switched it off!
I worked for a well known Swedish furniture retailer and when you called through to speak to another department it always played the same songs in the same order. Maddening!
We had CDs that we’d play on loop in the media section of Best Buy in 2005. It had a “DJ” on it who said it was “Best Buy Radio” making it sound like it was a live radio station feed to our customers. I don’t know how many times I got to hear the same songs over and over. Thankfully I only worked there part-time and for a short while. I still can’t listen to Gold Digger by Kanye West to this day because of it…among other reasons. 😅
Heh, I worked at a grocery store a lifetime ago, probably something like 21 years now, and it also had one of those "short list" of eternal background music. In particular, "A Thousand Miles" is permanently burned into my brain with working that job. Whenever I hear it, I just see myself stocking shelves in that miserable and dirty store.
AMC Theaters between 2004 and 2008, the BGM Cds looped every 20-25 minutes, because it was determined that was more than enough time for a guest to buy their ticket and start their movie.
It was so mind numbing for most employees. I say "most" because I had the pleasure of getting to work as a projectionist, away from the BGM.
I worked in a diy store part time in the 70s. The background music system always played faster beat ‘hurry-up’ music in the last 15 minutes or so before closing time. Apparently it encouraged shoppers to make their final purchases and make their way to the checkouts.
Where I currently work, the music just turns off 10 minutes before closing time. I think it helps set the "We are now closed and you should not be here anymore" vibe
8:32 “Scanning…4250%”
Wow, that’s… ambitious 😄
I'm surprised it's not running an ARM system-on-chip. That Vortex86 part is an odd one, basically a very fast 486 workalike. It shows up a lot in weird embedded systems running weird legacy software.
It looks like the DX3 version is more like an i686 since it supports USB2, SATA, PCIE, and DDR3. It's also dual core and I'm not aware of any dual-core 486s.
I have a couple small 5.7" touchscreen computers based around the Vortex86 CPU, and they're fun little things, lacking ACPI and having a physical power switch brings up a neat little feature in WindowsXP though, when you shut it down, XP actually gives you that classic message "It is now safe for you to turn off your computer." when it's all done, a nice bit of geeky nostalgia... :D
Consumer products vs something like this are different worlds. The cost of the box doesn't become such an issue as they're not shipping millions. Ease of support and development will be their priority.
Give me a shout if you want to sell one. TH-cam doesn't like links to search Instagram for ThinkingSnap
This will be pretty good for someone using old 486-compatible software for industrial machinery.
I work in a large chain of small clothing stores. Our BGM system is actually CD-based in some way. Every so often, we're sent a CD that we simply throw into a player to update. It doesn't play *from* the CD, but rather seems to download the music and play on its own.
That sounds so back to front, I mean you can keep literal months of music on an optical disk, why not just have the music on the disk encrypted with a key that your BGM device downloads from the service to unlock?
@@Mostlyharmless1985 Because a 700M collection of MP3, compressed at 64k, is a really large number of songs, and with a file containing a playlist the player interprets and uses after the files are copied off, no need to use any bandwidth, plus they save on needing ot have a high bandwidth CDN server for the stores. After all, a $1 CD and $2 for the courier fee to the store, giving the store the ability to play even without Internet, is a big bonus. Especially for smaller stores, where they might, by location, have really poor service otherwise, and keeping the limited bandwidth for POS transactions is more important. Plenty of stores where the POS runs off SIM cards from a carrier, and there is only mobile data available there for some reason or the other.
@Mostlyharmless1985 that's probably what it did. I know that's basically the system used for game DLC on the disc (only applicable to 360/PS3 games)
@@Mostlyharmless1985 Because a CD player has moving parts, making it having much lower MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure)
@@vordan7111that doesn't really track, MTBF for just about every optical drive I've encountered in my lifetime borders on decades. It's a servo motor and a laser diode. It's hardly Edison's talking machine. It also doesn't make sense to send optical discs to subscribers if they download the music to the machine because you should be able to do that with various authentication protocols.
That little box while sterile on the outside contains contains OCEANS of ingenuity. Over the decades, thousands of man-years have been poured into developing the hardware and the software to the point where you just plug it in and it starts playing.
It's not as difficult as you might think. Around 20 years ago I built a little Linux machine out of leftover parts which would just start playing random music off whatever zip disk was inserted in the drive. I put this together for my brother for use in his car (and set it up with a read-only filesystem so that power interruptions wouldn't be a problem), and it was a simple evening project.
@@fluffycritterwho made your silicone
@@AgentOffice *silicon
[5:52] Stepping through the video frames I see that the SD card is mounted as an EXT4 filesystem. This is a linux filesystem. You can probably copy the SD card if you block-level copy it; on linux I would use the "dd" command to do that. Anyway, thank you for your videos, they are always worthwhile!
I know those things! A few months back I had to help transferring the IT gear for a popular kitchenware chain in Australia to another store. While all I needed to do was their computer system, there was another guy there for the sound system and bits and pieces that fell out of our contract. One of them was this sound system. He needed to buy an adapter so it’d play in their store speakers which was installed years before they moved in.. I hung around and helped the kid cause he was young and had no idea, he came from a world where everything is hdmi or Bluetooth
Retrotech nerd here. DM&P is what's left of ALi/ULi back in the day (i.e., the 90s), and the Vortex86 chip is... interesting. It's basically a 1st Gen Pentium by way of what's called 'architecture' (the way the chip works) -- but, it doesn't implement a particular instruction ("CMOV", Conditional Move), at the binary/"assembly language" (the actual instructions the chip itself knows) that, while _technically_ optional within the 5x86 spec, in practice is the difference between a 486 CPU and a 586 (Pentium 1) CPU. This effectively makes it, functionally, a 486 that implements a bunch of 586 instructions but isn't really a proper 586 -- sort of like how the NEC V20 and V30, a decade or so earlier, implemented the 80186/80188 instruction set on top of the 8086/8088 set and basically acted as much better 8086/8088 CPUs than the original.
The Vortex86 design is actually at least the third generation of this particular CPU design, as well -- its predecessor was the SiS 550, back when Silicon Integrated Systems was even vaguely relevant in the PC world. As far as I can tell, while they still exist, they haven't done anything since 2007, and the last half-decade-or-so up to that point they had moved away from CPUs and chipsets entirely, and were focusing on... touch panel controllers for LCD touchscreens. (Pffft.) For what it's worth, the Vortex86 started as a special variant of the SIS55x series (yes, it was a series), integrating Smart Card and MMC/Memory Stick controllers, which ran at 166MHz and was called the M6217D. DM&P at the time was actually Jan Yin Chan Electronics Co LTD, out of Taiwan... eventually they swallowed up other companies to become DM&P Group.
However, the SiS55x design did NOT originate with that company... they actually bought it, along with the rest of the company that created it, when they acquired Rise Technology in 1999. Rise had been formed in 1993, and produced the mP6 CPU, which doesn't appear to be well-documented, but from what information I can find, appears to be an independent implementation of the 5x86 design (i.e., not licensed from Intel, but designed in-house to act identically, outwardly, even though the ground-up design internal to the chip is entirely different). It implements the Pentium MMX version of things, but Rise unfortunately took so long to develop the chip that by the time it was _finally_ released in 1998, the market it was designed for was essentially dead and gone -- the second generation of Pentium-class chips (Pentium II and AMD K7 / early Athlon/Duron/etc) were already out. Despite their best efforts, Rise just couldn't compete in the big leagues, and SiS snapped them up not long after.
Systems like this EBox PC are actually kind of sought after in the retrotech community by people who want a relatively-simple-to-set-up-and-run "nostalgia box" for later DOS and pre-XP Windows games. Something like this would run most adventure games from the era (back when they really were a thing) quite well... not sure about something like Quake, but since you can run DOOM on a friggin HP printer as long as it has a screen somewhere, _that_ shouldn't be an issue... basically this is the equivalent of a _seriously_ hopped-up, hot-rodded 486 from about the mid-90s, that can play most games from about five years before and through about five years after, give-or-take. It's usually fairly simple, relatively speaking, to get Windows 98 or 2000 running on one of these, with full hardware support, and only the hardcore purists will care that, for example, Sound Blaster audio is emulated, rather than being an actual hardware implementation -- but, this sort of thing isn't for such folks anyways.
Now you know.
“I made that last one up… it was 6%” almost caused a laughing spit take with my morning coffee. Bravo, Mat 🤣
5% death metal - that would shake costumers a bit up indeed! not bad idea I must say!
Would like to hear that in the local supermarket
Splice in like .5% Norwegian Atmospheric Blackened Doom Metal and im game.
Similar to the Music on Hold systems for phone systems, those used to make you think you were hearing things as they had little speakers in them so if you were working in a server room with one plugged into a phone system you would keep hearing voices faintly in the background, even when the place was empty used to freak a few people out for a while till they got used to them
Your videos are ALWAYS fun. Thanks Mat.
This is an 486 based processor, ideal for retro gaming! Your Background Music Player DOES run DOOM!
486 based? It has a x86 architecture, but it is same as based on a 486 than any other later x86 CPU is. ;-)
I worked at one of the original "theme" restaurants and besides music we played video clips and they were all on a huge (big as a old school jukebox ) Laser disc multi disc player for both the music and video if I remember maybe 50 laser discs and every month we would get new ones to replace the film trailers of upcoming films. The DJ booth also had top of the line CD players with pitch control and 2 Technic 1200 turntables and Urei Mixers. It was an amazing set up for the late 90s
We had an Imagesound player back when I worked at DW Sports. Everything was delivered by the network connection. We'd periodically get updates but on the whole it was the same mind numbing royalty free music you can still hear in Poundland/B&M/The Range now.
My local Tesco plays some great stuff - a few times I've noticed other people (as well) humming along or quietly doing the harmonies on the chorus 😆
@@keithsquawk I'm not surprised. Imagesound also supply the music for McDonald's and their playlists are fantastic - genuinely better than most radio stations. It's all down to how much companies are willing to shell out.
14:12 I couldn’t help but picturing you and the misses lumbering to move the Seeburg while the cat stares bemusedly.
A new techmoan video is always more than just "some fun"
I've worked a bit with the video equivalent of these type of devices, often referred to as "digital signage". They can be nothing more than slide shows without audio, or video with audio presentations as were done with VCRs in the past. At the higher end are ones used for electronic menus at fast food restaurants and such. They're basically a more powerful version of the box demonstrated here, and are closer to a "real" or general purpose computer. They tend to be built to avoid noisy fans, although smaller quiet ones are used, too.
Thanks for the video, Mat!
I'm sure it's changed by now, but the digital signage systems I worked with were bog-standard mITX x86-64, usually Intel CPUs and motherboards, in OnLogic M350 or MC500 cases.
The real expense, of course, was the HDBaseT and up-link equipment. $70,000+ rack to connect and distribute from a $500 PC to a bunch of $300 TVs. 😂
@@Azlehria I'm sure there were/are both generic PCs in various smaller form factors as well as more specifically designed units being used for digital signage and related purposes. The most recent ones I've seen were just Dell ultra-small FF units being used in an office environment.
Not sure which system my old work used to have but you could tell which manager was on shift by the genre of music they'd switch the system to. If more than one was there they'd keep going back and changing between genres. It was kind of funny hearing it suddenly cut to another song throughout the day. A bit of a musical battle of sorts between my managers.
Seems like the managers care more about themselves than the people they are supposedly managing, just like where I work.
I was installing the server rack (Refrigerator sized computer) for a brand new store opening up. As part of that was included a background music player. Young people bringing in the merchandise were having a bit of an argument about the existence of a song; The Hokey Pokey. I said that it was an actual song and I'll play it for you. I pulled it up, patched it and a microphone (from the mic port on the device) into the public address system. Announcing throughout the entire store about the argument in the back and by special request, We shall be pleased to hear; The Hokey Pokey.
The bane of all shop workers.
Speaking of "Just get a Raspberry Pi", I was long wanting something like Mat's Sony digital music player, but they are not cheap. We did look at a "Brennan B3" but it doesn't connect to the amplifier without a separate DAC, so you'd end up with loads of extra cables and power supplies
So end of 2023, I put together a Raspberry Pi, attached DAC on a board (HAT connector), flashed a distro/player called MoOde Audio and added a stick of music.
Great fun, now I can not only play though the speakers, but I can get that background music effect throughout the flat, controlled from a web front end
I take Matt's point though. Handy as it is, it does not have the delight of a record player the size of his Bob dishwasher doing its thing
Even an SBC is overkill. ESP32 with audio amp and sd reader under $10.
@gabest4 Well, it's done now. If I want to do it again then I can look at the ESP32. With this I have a touchscreen UI for anyone else that wants to use it just as a normal appliance, not fart around using the web interface of streaming to VLC or the like (or even a port on a browser)
If I am doing that again, I will see if the ESP32 has the fuctionality, with whatever boards it needs, though when I had a quick look, my solution is still cheaper as I did not need to buy a 3D printer to make a case :D
On a side note for a BGM fail: my place of work played BGM music from a PC BUT when installed, only had a limited number of tracks. These went round in a loop and, eventually, started driving staff potty.
Took forever (years) to get any movement on changing the music from IT. Why?
Person who knew login details had left the company.
Eventually, we had a new system installed. Still centrally controlled (frustratingly) but at least it seems someone knows the login details now! 😂
The flip side of that was a bar that I used to go to in the 90's, it automatically DJ'd the music by controlling two cd jukebox's, the music was always great and appropriate for the time of day, until the day it wasn't...when the staff got the password
That's what your channel taught us: the beauty of 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 music. I agree on what you said at the end.
3:37… ahhhh, background music systems and “All I Wanna Do” go hand in hand. 🤝
Somewhere I used to work they had Lighthouse Family's Ocean Drive album on, for two years straight. That was the best part of twenty years ago and it's only recently I've been able to enjoy their music again.
I worked outside Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville and they played the same five Jimmy Buffet song over and over.
There's still one thing I'm dying to know, can it run Doom?
I think yes, there has been Vortex86 build on the internet before.
Can confirm, I own one of those eBox machines!
@@nhansgoofyvideos7581 one could anyway just download the freedoom engine source codes and build a working binary on the device itself.
5:45 - 1ghz CPU and 960mb RAM - should be able to handle it with ease. A few seconds later you see it has a SliTaz Linux Kernel - would be trivial for someome in the know* to get a Linux port of Doom on it 😁
*not me! 😂
@@moo4983really?
Nice recap, I loved the added bits from the previous version, it explains quite a lot of its overall funcionality and quirks, unfortunately it's quite limited even for a MicroPC
Such a cool little device. I find the background music players to be an interesting niche. Using a tiny little system on a chip with hardly any moving parts seems like the ultimate evolution.
Perfection and boringness often go together n tech, unfortunately.
I worked at Toys "R" Us back around 2001-2005, and their BGM was a cassette tape that ran about 4 hours before repeating. That wasn't too bad. Yes, it got a bit repetitive by the time the next tape arrived; tapes were changed monthly.
The Christmas ('04?) tapes arrived at the end of October, to start November 1. Two tapes, swapped weekly, to take us to New Year's. Of course, they lost the second tape immediately.
I didn't work on BGM for TRU, but when I did service work for them about 10 years ago I once ran across a _previous_ incarnation of that system, possibly from the location's previous life as a Sears. It had been abandoned along with all the other equipment in that wiring closet, locked away in the similarly-abandoned basement, and surrounded by piles upon piles of cassettes with a thick layer of dust on everything.
I still regret not taking some of them with me, as the earliest label I remembered was scheduled for July of '81. The tape in the deck was from sometime in '93.
It still fascinates me that Wi-Fi installs, which weren't critical line-of-business equipment, were an overnight lock-in; while POS installs, which _are_ critical, had start times as late as 8 AM. Yet we were required to have the store use _only_ the new systems, even if it delayed opening. Still doesn't make sense.
I remember the supermarket I worked at in the late 90s had dual tape decks and new tapes sent out monthly. Once a tape came in that actually had 3-4 goods songs in a row (o.k. 2 great songs and 2 so-so ones). Anytime I was going past the system office and no one was around to tell me not to, I'd cue up the good songs and cut to them at the end of the current song. On the way back to my department, I'd get a nod of approval from those other workers, who knew it hadn't been 4 hours since hearing those songs.
funnily enough, the eBox is a regular off-the-shelf thin client PC, and a rather neat one at that. those BGM players might be worth grabbing one for the hardware alone.
For roughly the same price a Raspberry Pi 4 seems a lot more capable thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b
@@Techmoan Years ago, these mini pcs were used for robotics projects before the raspberry pi even existed. We used them in university. I've still got one, made by ebox.
Love that Seeburg machine you have! Good lil video that, Matt. Thanks, Lee
Just love this channel! 👍👍
I worked in a hotel that played Stars by Simply Red and only that. Drove me half daft.
The Vortex86 is a modern 486, so the lack of PAE and x64 extensions is expected. It'll DOS game like a monster, though.
Was thinking actually. Would it run Doom?
@@Pepsiphopia It will, though probably not fast, as the VGA hardware likely is limited in RAM.
@@SeanBZADoom doesn't exactly need a lot of video RAM...
@@CptJistuce No, but those boards typically only are going to support at best 1024 by 768 video, and most will only do 640 by 480 generally, so they likely laso only support 8 bit colour as well, because most of the time they are doing CGA emulation.
@@SeanBZAtypo? CGA isn't 8-bit colour, and why would it be using that?
also, this particular device clearly supports at least 16-bit colour, judging by the way ubuntu looked on it
If you can get hand of a "Yehova's Witnesses Phonograph" from around 1940 you should make a review about that: Probably the first vertical record player, fully mechanical (for 78s), but using a paper cone like in a loudspeaker with the needle connected to it, which gives it a very good sound quality. Technically really genius.
Really interesting to see the evolution between this version of the video and the first one. I actually enjoyed the first one, but this is so much better!
I just love Seeburg. Such a beautiful piece of equipment. That was the video that made me a Techmoan fan.
Short or long videos, doesn’t matter.
Seeing you in the morning with breakfast is a great start to the weekend 👍🏼
Happy New Year to you
Lovely video as usual ❤
Greetings from Copenhagen 🇩🇰
Cold as this piece of tech may be, this video was a really nice way to round out the exploration into the different background music systems you've reviewed in the past. Gives some nice context, and additional appreciation of the clever techniques the older systems had to come up with for continuous play.
Liked and left a comment just because... you never waste my time asking me!
I deal with Image sound a lot and have to say from the back office to the installation engineers a great company 👍🏻
In the 90's we build a 486PC with a sound blaster card and winamp. We had the salespeople create short messages, then 'acquired' short pieces of soft-rock music to play. We built a playlist and set it to play randomized. Much later I had to program a bunch of USB based players for MOH. We subscribed to a service to record the music and voice recordings.
Thanks for this! I detect a slight hesitancy to embrace the tech, but do really appreciate seeing your take on something different even if it’s newfandangled and doesn’t break one’s back lifting it… 😊
Thank you Mat for showing us this mini computer background music system. Yes, some of the older systems has their appeal, but I found a personal computer filled with ripped CD's and MP3 files with a sound player software capable of random song selection, the more ideal background music system. Your DJs for dance or wedding parties use PCs.
5:52 It says "EXT4-fs (sda1): mounting ext3 file system using the ext4 subsystem". So you couldn't read the card because it uses ext3, something neither macOS nor Windows supports out of the box. You can use third party software like Paragon extFS which is available for both Windows and Mac. Or just boot into Linux as you did.
100% I was about to say it was probably a Linux format no license costs
We the same company at work and it's pretty good. I can't remember ever hearing the same song twice in the same day and the repeats I can recall have been days apart. I also like how they play a few songs from one genre then move to another. They even do that during Christmas so with the exception of Christmas Eve (and even then I don't recall hearing a repeat) there was never more than a few songs in a row. (I love Christmas music but I loathe hearing the same 20 songs everywhere I go!)
0:59 "With all of these modern things they can switch it off and your thing doesn't work"
Clearly this is progress.
That just about sums up most modern tech in general
I think Nobles is possibly the Noble Organisation, formerly a UK operator of amusement/slot machine gambling venues under a varied range of brands. They are now part of Astra Gaming.
Having songs play in a random order and having new songs randomly rotated in would be great for those working in retail! For several months in 1997 I worked at a Best Buy where their BGM system consisted of a Pioneer 6 disc CD changer attached to a multi-room capable AV receiver which pumped the audio to the overhead speakers throughout the store. The audio system was attached to a timer that would power it from 10am to 9pm which were the store hours M-Sat. It played the same 6 CDs in the same order on repeat every day and the CDs were only changed once per quarter.
I was on the "merchandise" team who basically stocked all the shelves, were generally in store from 6am-10am every day and 6am-12pm on Sundays. We always knew exactly when it was 10am as the same song would start playing every day and we always had to listen to 2 hours of the same songs every Sunday morning as the store didn't open until noon on Sundays at that time.
My next job after that was managing a used CD store where the clerks could pick out what the house CD changer would play which was awesome in comparison!
The store I work at in the US has a player from a company called Mood music. the music tracks are loaded off a CD. we get update discs every so often.
I did something like that for a jukebox for my desk at work for while. We used a Muzak system for the waiting rooms and hallways that got its playback from FM subcarriers. Anyway, as always thanks for sharing this!
I recently worked in a mall restaurant for 6 months. The bgm inside the restaurant consisted in a 30 minutes loop of advertisements for the chain on a big tv in the entrance. It was quite loud and we couldn't change the volume. The loop got changed every two months when they send us a new DVD. My boss told me it has been the same system for at least 10 years and they said it would be too expensive to change it now because we have about 90 stores around the country. Outside the restaurant, a loop of music also played in the mall. I've counted no more than 12 tracks changing every month. In August, we got the entire OST of the movie Barbie for some reason.
Not enough death metal ! Hilarious. Thanks Mat for making these videos so entertaining.
Imagine telling someone in the 80s that playing music on a PC is now considered low intensity.
Awesome video Techmoan; what an incredible little device! I love low-end computers; I bet you could make an awesome photo-frame with one of these!
It is also interesting to see the modern things and solutions!😀
6:17 from my experience SliTaz is a really small Linux distro that can boot from
Nobles is a chain of Amusment Arcades (fruit machines) I believe.
We have a Stingray box at my store and it we get streamed the same hundred or so songs every day. It turns into a form of psychological torture to keep hearing the same songs every day. I guess they subscribe to 'play it until you hate it' mantra. It's honestly baffling that it works like this, because it is a streaming service. Maybe my company is too cheap to pay for more music, which seems likely. It does have a line in that overrides it, and you can plug a phone or an MP3 player into it, and when I worked over nights, that's what I'd do. You can only hear 'Jump' by Chris Cross so many times, before you never want to hear it again.
A Papa Johns in my neighborhood had a similar device, but for some reason it wasn't password protected, one of the employees one day replaced the playlist of songs with a 10hr loop of the Spiderman Pizza music 😂😂😂
Being forced to hear "Kris Kross'll make ya (jump, jump)" multiple times a day should be grounds to sue for torture (if it already isn't).
@@SUPRAMIKE18 If I flip the pizzas, Aziz will flip out.
I thought 2 months of Christmas songs on repeat on the radio was bad, but a single CD on repeat? Wow.
Christ, the sole thought of unshuffled BGM gives me anxiety and some depressing flashbacks: back in August 2017 I worked at a hotel and they definitely had some kind of 24 hour long playlist cause you could tell time by whichever song came on (I remember Kinobe's instrumental of "slip into something more comfortable" meant it's 16:08). I'm sure it annoyed other colleagues too but those in charge were never forced to listen to the song for 8-12 hours and couldn't care less. Shame, cause I'm certain in 2017 the BGM system was definitely digital.
Half-assed BGM solutions are enough of a reason to never work in retail, customer service etc
You should really, really, really change the battery before it starts leaking.
Greetings from Germany,
Marcus
It's always interesting to see how devices have evolved over the years.
I'd be super interested to see an image dump of the SD card, just to see what sorts of player engine it uses and how easy it might be to decrypt that data partition. I'm guessing that the encryption in place isn't all that secure, especially since the device needs to be able to decrypt it in some way. I wouldn't be surprised if the decryption key is just stored in the fstab.
But is there any encryption at all? At boot time second partition is just ext3 fs. It maybe corrupted and thus refusing to mount. EXT3 does not support full fs encryption, its usually done by block device mapper like LUKS. I doubt service owner bothered to modify ext3 drivers to support any sort of encryption considering how lousy their device is - you can see its loads XFS, NFS, wireless drivers.. Its Slitaz with minimal modifications.
I would like how data partition is mount in fstab too, since system partition mounts just fine.
We have this system where I work and it changes the genre, tempo and style of music throughout the day.
If I were running a business, I'd probably go the 'cheap ass' route, and set up a free version with public domain and royalty free music. I mean, people don't generally pay much attention to the BGM at a store as it is, so just find pleasant enough older tunes and you're good.
It might be a different story if we're talking about a trendy place, but who knows with trends? I could totally see trendy types deciding that a place that a place that only plays music from ~100 years ago mixed with modern 'unknown artists' is 'lit' or whatever it is kids these days say.
Cool device. I've actually set up a very similar "radio station" system for my family to use, with a random selection of a couple of thousand tracks, all ripped from my CD collection. Great sound, one button operation, and it won't become obsolete when Spotify et al. change their APIs.
I would like to do something similar, can you give me more details about how did you do it.
Great video but it's still weird to hear techmoan saying words like ddr3 and 1GHZ Intel something or other. I like words like gears, sprockets and "bits and bobs" more hahaha
We're getting old mate. We're getting old
Ha! I have one of those old boxes. I used to work for the company that supplied them and the system before ImageSound acquired it a few years ago. We also provided a version of the system which was essentially just two fairly decent speakers with an SD card mp3 player in the back. We provided a way for people to sync-up their playlists onto the card since the speakers weren't online. Sometimes we even just posted freshly synced SD cards to the premises! Old school!
You are building a great tech history site and gear. Cheers...
Yeah, I agree. That Seeburg is an absolutely beautiful piece of equipment.
Prior to my retirement I listened to the web site you referred to in your Seeburg video. I quite enjoyed it.
On the topic of "Oh just get a raspberry pi" I wanted to build a BGM machine for my office to help mask the air conditioner vent's ticking noise. A pair of cheap (but decent) bookshelf speakers, a dac/amp combo unit, and a raspberry pi 4 did the job for me.
First, I set up a library in my Plex server for bgm. I threw in some video game music, TV and movie soundtracks (just the bgm, though, none of the music with lyrics), and some symphonic and orchestral works. Just enough to keep me interested without distracting from my job. Then, I installed the headless Plexamp image on the pi, got it all configured, and pointed it at my BGM library. Occasionally, I refresh the library by adding to it, but I don't usually take anything out.
If I do another project along these lines, I'd do something like a Mycroft pi connected to a mic array and speakers so that it can do more than just bgm. That would just be an at-home project, though. I don't need a smart speaker at work, and I don't want to deal with the potential privacy concerns with student PII - even if I use a private assistant like Mycroft.
Such a fascinating little computer. It seems it's based on old 486 chips but significantly modernized. Dual core, 1ghz. I would never have thought I'd see a dual core 486 much less a 486 at 1Ghz! Very slick.
When I was in high-school I worked as a waiter at a Mexican themed nigh-club / restaurant. They played the same 5 CD's over and over, every night. Staff would leave because they simply couldn't stomach the music not even one more time. One staff member climbed over the counter, grabbed the 5 disc changer and smashed it against the floor before leaving. They repaired the CD changer and it was back to the same 5 CD's over and over and over and over again.
It was nice to see this. Even if this isn't in itself as interesting as the older stuff where they had to work within more limitations it's still interesting to see something that most people wouldn't have much dealings with, see how much things have moved on and put the older stuff in perspective.
Great video, Mat...👍
Interesting video! It's tech you take for granted when you go to stores and restaurants
Devices such as these are also commonly used on telephone systems, as a 'Music On-Hold System', where customers will hear music & directed advertisements, when placed in a holding queue, rather than just hearing silence. I've seen these used in banks, hospitals, real estate brokers, etc...
As for uniqueness, they're pretty straight forward. Compared to the Seaberg BMS, the newer devices are a glorified MP3 Player.
It’s funny how “just use a Raspberry Pi” is more or less what the BGM companies are doing now. A 486-core SBC instead of an ARM core, but still. It’s even using the built-in DAC and amp!
For a few years I was a state representative here in the US for ASCAP - the music rights society responsible for collecting licensing fees and distributing funds to songwriters. But, that was before fancy digital audio files were a thing. Every retail store, bar and venue hated seeing me walk through the door as it meant I was there to either collect money or advance the stages of a lawsuit for public performances of copyrighted music.
It is my understanding that these new digital systems pay all licensing fees to ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and other such organizations and then “pass the savings” onto subscribers. So much has changed yet so much stays the same.
The little NUC is a perfect device for this background music task.But I totally agree with you, I prefer the ingenuity of the classic analogue hardware tape or disc players. They were so much more interesting. Like a modern day smart phone, you can do everything with an app and software, but the old ways were so interesting and clever.
Wow, so compact! I frequented a department store in the 1970s-80s that used reel to reel tape for their store music. I was shocked one day to hear the Muzak version of "Hell is For Children" played. Gotta love it!
I don't know what it is exactly but i keep enjoying your content quite a lot. Thank you for another interesting Video.
My place of work still uses analog based receivers for their BGM, tuned to a publicly available FM signal at all their nearly 104 locations. There's literally nothing stopping anyone from walking in with a fairly decent FM transmitter and overriding the signal. XD
I work in a Salon and we have these. It's a service called Retail Radio and has a few commercials from us and I believe downloads current music from online.
A few years ago, i went to a local small restaurant that had an interesting (not really) BGM...an actual latop on a stand, hooked up to a speaker system, running windows and with TH-cam on. Brilliant!...but then again, it was a very small restaurant.
Used to work at a Dutch company that makes this kind of things, was the main software engineer on their systems. A lot of things sounds familiar :). Mostly Linux based (although we had Windows software that worked as a streaming service, see it as Spotify B2B) and multi levels of encryption. Our music collections were FAT though, and all the files were encrypted. Also, all the harddrives were interchangeable between clients. So depending on your subscription, the player would play certain lists / programmes. But every programme we had was on the large 250gb disk that was in every machine. That way the disks were 'universal' and if it broke, it was an easy replacement for a tech, sales rep, or even customer who wanted to use a screwdriver themselves.
The world is changed since I was young, those autochanging cassetteplayers was the best at that moment.
I'd have agree with you, those older types seem to have an aesthetic visual quality to them that the "micro-computer" types don't.
Having worked at Target for almost 2 years I can confidently say that I heard MANY repeat songs, especially "I feel love" by sam smith, a sped up recording of mr. blue sky, and a piano cover of hey ya.