AV Soft

The latest version of AV Mix Master (introduced in version 4.1) now has a complete kiosk overhaul. See the screenshot below. It not only looks brand new, but it has some great new features as well. Best feature must be the dual YouTube video rendering. Which means you can play YouTube videos just as you would play normal music files. The YouTube videos will mix and fade-out like normal files. AV Mix Master will even preload YouTube content in the inactive player, so it will play without any buffering problems. Read on after the image.

The Looks

As you can see the kiosk uses album covers as your background. AV Mix Master will first search your music library for “folder.jpg” files, which usually are used for album covers. The album covers are translated to black & white and will be stored in the folder “C:\ProgramData\AV Soft\BackgroundCache” for future retrieval and caching (which means that the kiosk will have greater startup speed). On top of that an overlay with a slight transparency. This overlay will change colors around every 60 seconds.

The interface is quite clean and only contains these features:

• Now Playing (in this case “Nelson – She’s Gone”)
• Coming Up / Just Played (in this case Madonna with Justify My Love)
• YouTube video (if any is played), in this case the YouTube video of Nelson with She’s Gone.
• Control buttons (only after mouse move or after clicking the touch circle)

During play, some elements will animate so that screen burn is prevented.

How does it work?

Show

To start the kiosk, simply click the “Kiosk” button at the top of the main screen in AV Mix Master. Now the kiosk will build. Note that this might take some time the first time it is started.

Hide

To hide the kiosk, simply click anywhere except on a control button, now playing album cover or YouTube video.

Controls

The following controls are available in kiosk mode:

• Skip Track: the circle button with two arrows is used for skipping to the next track
• Play/Pause: the circle button with either two vertical stripes or a right-pointing arrow can be used to either start or stop the player
• Eject upcoming track: on top of the “coming up” album cover is an eject symbol. Click it to eject the next track in case you don’t like what’s coming up
• Touch button: the button with the finger symbol can be used on touch screens to bring up the other controls. If you hover the mouse, all control buttons will be visible. The control buttons will automatically hide after a user is inactive for about 3 seconds.
• YouTube buttons: below the YouTube video a button row is found with these buttons: Reload, Close and Full Screen. Reload will simply reload the player with the current track (to be used if you want to rewind the video or if the player did not get loaded in the first place"). The Close button will make the YouTube video invisible whilst still playing the sound of that video. The full screen button will simply make the YouTube video full screen. In that case a full screen close button will show at the top right corner so you can return to normal video mode

Album Images

The new kiosk will automatically retrieve album images from internet if the album image is not embedded in the music file that is playing. These album images will be used in the background and will be cached for future kiosk starts.

Other features

Many other small features are in the new kiosk, but they are all quite subtle so no need to explain them here. If you have performance problems on your PC (the new kiosk is a bit more memory and CPU intensive than the other one), you can still use the old kiosk mode. To do so, you need to click the settings button and go to the settings form. Click Kiosk and then deselect “Enable animated kiosk (requires restart)”. As mentioned in the checkbox, you need to restart AV Mix Master to have the old kiosk in effect.