A 1989 jukebox for my gym

When I was a kid, the best part of going to Pizza Hut was the tabletop jukebox. You flipped through the title cards, found a song, and pressed the code. For me that meant power ballads and hair metal, Warrant, Poison, Bon Jovi and Whitesnake.

I wanted that in my gym. So I built one with Lovable and set it up as a kiosk on an iPad, where anyone can walk up and pick a song.

It works like the real thing. Songs sit on cream title cards, ten to a page, each with a selection code like A1 or B7. Flip the pages, tap a title, and it joins the queue. Up next shows what's coming and how long it'll run. There's even a mechanical click when you press a selection.

The music lives on the device. I load my own files, it reads the artist, title, year and album art from the tags, and everything plays offline. Settings sit behind a PIN, so guests can pick songs but can't change the setup. From there I can set the volume, choose a short gap or a crossfade between songs, and keep the screen awake.

Always on random

It's always on random, and some days it plays from morning to night. Every time a song comes on, it takes me back to being a kid in a booth at Pizza Hut.