The Tuneshine
A short video where I’m taking a look at the Tuneshine, an album-art display device for digital music. This one came about following a suggestion received under the ITIC2 video back in July. After looking at the website it intrigued me, so I put in an order and it turned up early this week.
A few more people have since recommended the Tuneshine to me, so I suspect this one has been doing the rounds on social media.
https://youtu.be/6Y_AfSzjjL0
It’s only a quick video, but I feel it's enough to cover everything that needed to be said.
I can’t think of anything else of note to add this time so I’ll just say, enjoy the weekend. I’m going to take my weekend off - then next week I’m going to move straight on to attempting a fiddly repair… belts at the ready.
Comments (47)
Just set my unit up, it took only a couple minutes to link to Sonos - nice design!
It's somehow tragic that some people in the YT comments judge the Tuneshine by its pixels-per-buck ratio. For some it seems hard to grasp that sometimes it's the limitations that make something interesting. Why paint a picture in oil when photos from a smartphone are so much clearer and closer to reality...
Youtube comments are always full of people telling everyone (which turns out to be no one) what they won’t be buying. I try every time to explain that no one cares what you’re *not* doing - but the message never lands. I really hoped “I don’t give a stuff if anyone else buys one” - might be a stronger hint, but nope they just carry on telling everyone what they’re not buying because this is fascinating and useful information for all. In the end though it’s the old hollow vessel situation. People who don’t buy things like to shout about it, people who order something, keep that information to themselves.
I like this. I like the fact it is more than of a suggestion of the image, not full Hi Res. The wood version would look nice next to my vintage Technics HiFi setup. I’d stain it the colour which matches my wood units, and boom… sorted. £150+ I couldn’t do, but, I’ll definitely keep my eye on this products, for sure. Thanks Matt Lee
Hi, the Phil Collins photo looks good from the sofa but how does text look from sofa distance? I'd like to think the albums shown earlier in the video would have readable text from the Phil Collins photo distance? I'd consider buying if so.
It’s not really possible to read regular sized text as it’s only 96x96 pixels - however if the font gets big enough sometimes you can read it - but its got to be really big - like an album cover that just reads RUN DMC or similar. To get an idea as to how it looks in person you could try playing this video on an iPad/Laptop/Phone etc and position it perhaps ten feet away.
Not related to the video, but I just thought of a great title if you do another karaoke episode. "Carrie, are you ok?"
I do have one more karaoke set to explore so you never know - they need every bit of help they can get.
I must confess I had to stop the video half way because my only working eye started to throb trying to focus. I hope it's easier on the eye(s) in person as I'm sure that's just an artifact of the already hard process of recording a screen, especially a very low resolution one like this so I definitely don't blame you! Still, a very interesting concept.
Definitely easier on the eyes in person
Do you know if this displays artwork for iTunes-purchased music that's played from the Apple Music app? Or does it only show artwork for the Apple Music streaming service?
The first few tracks I tried were all my own music. There’s a bit in the video where I play a Beethoven track from the YouTube audio library and the thumbnail is a close up of the Teac O’Casse I added from one of my other videos.
Short, sweet and a cat at the end. Just perfect for the topic.
love the video and the device. :)
I want that to have a spectrum analyser as well !
You should check out Petru Designs! They have a good spectrum analyzer in a nice wood case
That looks remarkably like a module for a large video screen. A couple of years ago, English hardware hacker Mike Harrison (mikeselectricstuff on Youtube and elsewhere) did an event when he was in Pasadena California for the Hackaday Superconference, where a bunch of hackers (including Yours Truly) got together to see if we could reverse-engineer a panel from an LED Jumbotron. He had a bunch of those modules and gave them away to the hackers; I still have it somewhere. The reverse-engineering effort was unsuccessful that evening and though I recorded some video, I never published it. But as I understand, there were some people who had some success later; maybe the guy who makes these is one of the hackers who were there that evening? Anyway, good to see that you still have that DCC-175. Speaking of reverse-engineering: I now know exactly how it communicates with a computer and I'm trying to work on a device to connect it to a USB port. Unfortunately the way it's going, it might take a while before it's done...
That’s exactly what it is!
This is a nice project! I don't have any streaming services through. I liked Pandora when it came out but then it was banned in Europe and that was it. A brief encounter with Spotify a few years back made me recoil
You can check whether your preferred way to listen to music has a way to connect to last.fm! Many do and it’s a good way to use Tuneshine with a good ‘ol digital mp3/wav/flac collection.
Impressive project! It seems to be really polished, both the hardware and the software. You'd think it was an industrial product rather than a DIY project. A lot of work must have gone into the device. I am also a little envious... Many many years ago, friends and I tinkered with hand-wired 16x16 LED matrices in homemade wooden housings, controlled by an 8-bit microcontroller. Merely amateur level and orders of magnitude simpler than the Tuneshine. No wifi (wired UART instead), purely monochrome, just for simple animations and games like Tetris. It was more about the fun of tinkering than anything else. I apologize if this comes across as a plug (it's not meant as such). I mention this here because we made these simple devices look more elegant than they actually were with one secret ingredient: Frosted, slightly transparent black plexiglass: https://gallery.ctdo.de/picture.php?/1834/category/102 I can well imagine that this would also look very good on the Tuneshine. PLEXIGLAS® LED (truLED), Black & White 9H04 SC is the material used for the device in the picture.
Cool!! I might look in to this as a future option. Thanks for the tip!
Order placed tonight, after rapid tech support response from Tobias (confirming Pandora via Sonos works)
Thanks for ordering, Ian!
It's a nice device, but what will happen when the app goes offline? I wish as late as possible.
The long term emergency plan is to have a community firmware for those who want to to keep it going! But I am the biggest Tuneshine fan out there so as long as my device works, yours will too
Wow! Tuneshine creator here—thanks so much for taking a look at Tuneshine. Honored that it now has a permanent place in your home! With regards to how long it takes for the artwork to disappear—that is a quirk about the Apple Music integration. With some cleverness on my part, I'm able to detect when you start playing a new song on Apple Music, but it doesn't tell me when the song ends (I have to make a guess based on the song duration). Because there can be a delay in learning of a track change (another quirk of the integration), I've added a buffer time to ensure that album art transitions smoothly when playing through a playlist. 9 minutes seems longer than you should be seeing, though! I'll look in to that. Thanks again!
Hey Tobias you’ve been here since Sept 2017 - that’s serendipity (if I’m using that word correctly) - anyway I suppose I don’t need to send you that email now. If I were you I’d ignore the comments on YT when it goes live as they always go completely off the rails…however you might see a few extra orders come in. Thanks for your support and I’m glad I could pay some of it back.
That's quite a novel idea. It wouldn't be too hard to DIY for about £40 but it wouldn't be as polished but given the correct Github downloads onto an ESP32, I suspect the app would work with a home made one. These panels can be chained together too so you could add 4 and have 4x the resolution with a bit of code change.
It's fun to do as a DIY project! The parts would cost quite a bit more than that, though—closer to £100 most likely
Ahhh you got me at ‘Phil’..! Can’t wait to check this one out tomorrow morning when I go for my coffee. A Techmoan morning is a great morning. Nice one, Matt. Lee 😁
• But Mat - No Jacket Required. 😋 • The camera wiggle at 2:25 is a surprisingly cool effect. • For a brief moment I was dubious about the Tuneshine until you mentioned one man is hand-making them. That's really impressive considering the over-abundance of mass-produced fluff being made nowadays. • The 'Guess the Album' game was fun. • I loved your introductory montage of the devices with the albums. 🧡 • I see your reflection in your TV; hello 👋. • MP3 players - the cheap ones I owned back in the day had too many songs uploaded onto them - without a user-friendly interface, it became frustrating to locate a particular song I wanted to listen to. That, including inconsistent sound quality of 'shared' MP3s, put me off the devices. • This really looks great the further away you are from it - perfect for your use-case. • I hope you have a lovely weekend getaway planned 😃 • Thumbnail suggestion - perhaps include product icon: https://www.imghippo.com/i/5wzeC1725051891.png Have fun and take care. 🤍
I realised after making the video that the video recordings of the display were all shot a bit too close. I was looking at them through a small camera screen and then the preview window in the corner of the editor and it looked good. When I first saw the video full screen I was a bit disappointed. I like your thumbnail more than mine. I'll try it out as an alternative when the video goes live and see if it manages to attract more viewers.
What an excellent little device. Good video, Mat. Glad you and the missus were happy with both it and the Bose. My dad [RIP] had one of those for years, and it always sounded good. Basement room with his treadmill, it REALLY sounded good.
It looks a bit odd where it is, but it's the only space left - I've isolated it with foam feet from the sub its sitting on and I've really been enjoying listening to it. I've been meaning to listen to more Radio 4 & 4ex and so far it's doing the trick.
Thanks for making me want yet another Techmoan-inspired purchase; "Discipline, 007, discipline." It's good to see both you and Bees Knees are doing well. And it seems the cat likes your setup as well. A nice video.
The cat got into yet another fight last night and this morning I really thought he was dead for a moment as I couldn't get him to move. Fortunately he's coming around now, but for a brief moment this might have been the last video of him.
Or you can diy https://www.hackster.io/news/kyle-johnson-s-home-streaming-system-gets-chunky-album-art-visualization-on-a-64x64-rgb-led-matrix-71107071b8f2
Maybe you could - but I definitely can't. I'll leave the clever stuff to the clever people.
Pretty cool, pretty pricey, but I think he's going to be busy with orders when this goes live. Are comments turned off on YouTube, or have I been banned 😁
I haven't turned comments off - perhaps you used a word that put you in spam - I'll have a look.
That's a neat little device, pretty impressive it's just one person building them hand.
Thank you! It keeps me busy :)
"Frankly, I couldn't give a flying stuff if anyone else bought one. It's none of my concern." (cat wanders into shot and grooms itself)
Yes - whenever I show something that is currently on sale , there’s a sizeable contingent on YT that fall over themselves to tell me exactly why they don’t want one. The only thing less interesting that having someone tell you all about their previous night’s dream in excruciating detail - is hearing what someone *isn’t* buying. If someone were to order a million of these, or zero, my life remains totally unchanged.
What, no built in Shazzam?? RUBBISH!
Now if it could shazzam my minidisc- and cassette-based music, I'd have placed an order already!