Muzikbrowzer is owned, designed, developed, marketed and supported by me, Mike and my brother Mark, in Austin Texas USA. Development began in 1999 as a personal project. First release in 2002.

The Harmony 700 universal remote works well with Muzikbrowzer:

Using an Irman for remote control I drilled a hole in one of the rack panels and mounted the Irman behind the hole.

I tried the Pronto Pro universal remote, but don’t care for the touch screen. I’ve been using the MX-500 UniverslRemoteControl.com remote for several years and have been happy with it.

In the pic you can see how I programmed the 10 lcd labeled buttons for Muzikbrowzer functions. Plus I find that the 5 function “thumb disc” works nicely for Muzikbrowzer navigation.

Well in 1999 or so I began looking for a way to integrate digital music into my entertainment center. I wanted to play mp3 audio into my a/v receiver. Further more I wanted to browse my music library on my tv screen with a remote control.

There wasn’t much around at that time but I did look at a number of components and software. None of them came even close to what I wanted. Before long I began taking a closer look into what was available to be able to write a program to do this.

The first things I came across involved some perl modules and within a short time I had cobbled together a prototype of what I wanted. I called it ‘yajb’ for ‘yet another juke box’.

yajb worked well for me for some time. I even was able to have it read remote control signals via an ir receiver, Irman.

Well I used that for maybe a year or so. All my friends, family and anyone who saw it on my TV screen were very impressed and wanted it. So I figured maybe I should try to productize it and see if I could sell some copies.

So I then embarked on productizing the concept. Muzikbrowzer 1.0 was released in 2002.

yajb.pl (perl script)
Muzikbrowzer version 1

Here’s a picture of yajb on my tv: