It being so close to St Patrick’s Day, I decided to finally deal with the non-working music on hold at work since it gave me a good excuse to put Irish music on. Many years ago I had set up an ancient PC running Damn Small Linux (DSL) with mp3blaster running in shuffle / repeat mode connected to the PBX (private branch exchange) phone system. I had created a bunch of short audio tracks with little advertisements that would play while callers were on hold and it worked pretty well. The PBX has a wire with a standard 1/8" male jack that can be plugged into a music player, and so I had just plugged it into the speaker port of the PC. That machine (a Dell Dimension L400c) definitely had a good run. After it died I realized that it had been built in 1999.

To get some music playing again I looked around the office to see what I had available and my eyes fell on an old Acer A500 tablet (running Android 4.0.3 which I think is the most recent version of android Acer had pushed out to it). I didn’t want to set up a gmail account on the tablet, so I used the android browser to navigate to: https://f-droid.org/ and downloaded and installed the .apk for F-droid (you have to change your security settings to allow from unkown sources to install). F-droid is an alternative “app store” for free and open source android applications which I’ve used in projects like this in the past.

Once I had f-droid installed I was able to install two key applications: OpenExplorer Beta which is a file manager that can operate on files located on an external USB drive (the A500 has a USB port which I intended to use to load music files). After copying over a bunch of albums to the Music folder, I installed Vanilla Music Player which I’ve read is very stable. I loaded it up and it found all the music files and seemed to parse them correctly into albums or artists. I created a new playlist for St Pattys Day and added each album to the playlist. I was able to set the playlist to shuffle and repeat and set it to play and its been running good all day!

By the way, the song playing in the picture is Hungry Man #1 by Millish