I have a large collection of Music and wanted to be able to access it wherever I am. I looked around and found a few good web jukebox
type programs, but all of them were either very hard to set up or even harder to use. I eventually got tired of explaining to my
friends how to use the programs that I had found and decided to write my own.
There were a number of language options avalable. I chose PHP because of its portability and ease of installation.
The goal here has been to make YoDJ as easy as possible to set up and customize and to make the web user experience as easy and fast as possible. I wanted all of the navigational controls to remain visible at all times. I have more than 200 sub folders on my own system and scrolling up and down just to find some buttons would be a real nuisance!
YoDJ can easily handle music collections with thousands of files. You can annotate the files or directories as you please and control on a folder or file by file basis how users can see them or access them. You can also make some parts of your collection invisible. None of this is necessary to use and set up YoDJ, but the options are there.
Users can stream individual files, or by a folder and its contents.
Users can also interactively navigate the system and create a PlayList and then either play the list they had created or a portion of it. I hope the user interface is obvious. I have tried to display options only when they make sense. If you find any part confusing or have any suggestions, by all means let me know.
YoDJ will remember the referring URL. If you embed it in a web site, it will display a HOME button that will take you back to the place that it came from. If you enter the URL for YoDJ directly, the HOME button will not appear. You can also override this feature, but for the average web developer, its a nice convenience.
For speed and ease of use, I wanted a framing presentation in order to keep the buttons visible. I found that many older browsers do not support CSS frames very well. Even those browsers that do support CSS style frames do not make scrolling very easy. Windows IE browsers let you use the scroll wheel under CSS frames, but no other browser seems to. All of the other browsers require that you drag the scroll bar. I found that experience annoying.
The registered version o YoDJ allows you to default to CSS style frames if hats what you want.
YoDJ can be configured to display without frames of any kind, with HTML frames - which will work on all current browsers or with CSS frames. It is a mattter of taste. If you are using Windows IE and don't care if anyone else has a harder time scrolling, by all means enable CSS frames. Since I don't like Windows IE in general, I don't find this a compelling argument.
The entire presentation is managed using CSS styling. You can change much of the layout and coloring to suite your tastes and needs. The default matches my own taste. You don't have to change it, but like everything else, you can.
YoDJ will look for a configuration file or INI file matching its base name, so you can rename it and run many different versions or looks from the same location.