The Essential Mixer Is a Pocket-Size Raspberry Pi-Powered Jukebox for 30 Years of The Essential Mix
Offering wireless access and eight hours of playback per charge, the Essential Mixer packs the features into a custom-machined case.
Pseudonymous maker "Sabz5150" has put together a pocket-sized device that packs in three decades of electronic music history, serving as a functional archive of the BBC's show The Essential Mix — and being able to play any episode on-demand through an internal speaker.
"This project was built with the intent to archive and catalog the BBC radio show The Essential Mix, an electronic music show that has been running every weekend since 1993," Sabz5150 explains. "Everything needed is on the device, all transcoding software and tools."
The device itself is a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer — soon to be upgraded to a more powerful Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, Sabz5150 says — connected to a Pimoroni Pirate Audio Smol Speaker and a DFRobot Pi Zero UPS HAT with 18650 battery for up to eight hours of on-the-go use.
The hardware is housed in a customized casing, which includes a window with speaker grille and square-format graphical display plus a front panel with more compact OLED text display showing the device's current IP address for ease of access. "The case was custom machined by me using Delrin," its creator explains, "a plastic which is easy to machine and is durable."
The software, meanwhile, is dedicated to playing episodes of The Essential Mix — not as easy a task as it sounds. "Being 30 years old, the episodes are everywhere but it takes some work to find them and confirm they aren't all messed up," Sabz5150 explains. "The program yt-dlp is amazing for pulling from YouTube, and get-iplayer is good for recent stuff… when it cooperates."
"Generally new releases hit YouTube a couple of days after broadcast so I can take the dlp route there, too," Sabz5150 continues. "Sometimes they are on random servers and music archives online.
"Building the thing was easy. Populating it, that's hard. It's a lot of legwork (earwork?) to locate them, which could be anywhere from YouTube to Soundcloud to a random FTP server in the middle of nowhere that comes up when you query Google properly. Then you listen to make sure that it is a full, clean mix."
More details on the project are available in Sabz5150's Reddit thread.
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