I have had a Pioneer PD-F1004 for a couple of years. This is a 100 disc CD changer that has random play capability. Just punch a button, and one song off of each CD is played. Very nice. The problem was that I kept getting more CDs, and soon had 200. I searched the web and found out that Pioneer has the PD-AP1, a box that connects up to 3 changers together, and I also found software from WinTek that runs on a PC to control up to 8 changers. Too bad that both solutions were expensive. At least the PC software could control the less-expensive decks (and now Sony jukeboxes, too.)

Pioneer PD-F1004

Figuring that if someone else could write software to control the decks that I could, I purchased the newer Pioneer PD-F906. Whereas the 1004 had 4 compartments of 25 discs, the 906 has a single carousel that holds 101 discs. The 906 didn't have on-screen display, but now the computer can display song info.

Pioneer PD-F906

The WinTek home page gives nearly all the technical information needed for programmers to write their own jukebox software. All I needed to do was get the remote control signals, which I did with a borrowed oscilloscope. I had a spare Amiga 1000, which handily has color video out, so I wired up the parallel port to the players and wrote some code. I had to work a little to get the remote control signals to be stable enough for the player to be happy, but otherwise it was pretty straightforward. Now I can easily control up to 4 players, and with a little more hardware, eight isn't too bad. My software does random play between all decks, cuing up the next song while the current is playing so that there is no delay between songs. The CD and song info is displayed for the current and next songs.

Pioneer PD-F1007

I just purchased the new PD-F1007, the 301-disc changer. CDs would occasionally get stuck in the 1004, and we got more CDs. Luckily, the 1007 uses the same remote control codes and plugged right into my setup. In fact, two 1007s can be connected together to make one 602-disc changer! Unfortunately, they won't random play between the 2 players.

I did have to tweak the remote control codes a little bit- I put a bigger gap between each code, and even more between sending the same code twice. Also, since the 1007 has Title and Artist display, I wrote code to program all that text in automatically. It turns out that some remote functions send alternating codes, so I had to rewrite the program to handle that, as well.

I found some more remote control code info on a German web site. I was interpreting the codes as I saw them on an oscilloscope screen, (5 pulses, a delay, 4 pulses, etc). They explained how to read that as binary data, which helps me understand a little more. I want to experiment and see if there's a way to set the volume directly, instead of just having volume up and down, as well as power on, instead of power toggle.

While I was looking up codes for my replayTV, I found this page that gives "discrete" codes for my Pioneer receiver. There are single commands for power on (not toggle), CD select, etc, but not direct volume control.

I purchased PicBasic Pro to program Pic microcontrollers, and made my 2nd project a rewrite of my CD jukebox software. Now I've got a stand-alone box with a serial port that connects to any PC. I've created 2-letter commands for most of the basic CD and amplifier commands (ON, PL, ST, etc). I also programmed some macros that make random play of my 2 players easier. Checkout my Pic Juke page for the details.