In a commercial jukebox, a Play Stimulator is a feature that automatically plays a song after a certain period of inactivity; the theory is that it essentially reminds patrons that the jukebox is there which encourages people to use it.
DOSCab/WinCab Jukebox has an optional Play Stimulator mode that simulates this function. The play stimulator can be enabled in JUKEBOX.INI or toggled on and off via BTN_PLAYSTIMULATOR. When the Play Stimulator is enabled, a random song will play after the selected period of inactivity.
To enable the Play Stimulator via JUKEBOX.INI, set the number of seconds the jukebox is to be idle before the Play Stimulator kicks in by adding or changing the PlayStimulatorDelay setting in JUKEBOX.INI in the [Settings] section:
[Settings] PlayStimulatorDelay = 180
This would set the Play Stimulator to 180 seconds, or three minutes. Setting this value to 1 will cause the jukebox to play constantly as if it were in Radio Mode. Setting this value to 0 disables the Play Stimulator.
To avoid repetition, the Play Stimulator (and all other functions that randomly select songs) remembers the last 20 songs played and will avoid playing them again. However, this feature is disabled if the jukebox contains less than 40 songs. Songs higher on the Most Popular list will be selected for random play more often.
Radio Mode is similar to the Play Stimulator, except it selects a new random song as soon as the queue is empty. Although Radio Mode is essentially a play stimulator with a one-second delay, it is a separate function to allow both modes to be toggled independently.
To enable the Play Stimulator via JUKEBOX.INI, set the RadioMode setting in JUKEBOX.INI in the [Settings] section to Enabled.
[Settings] RadioMode = Enabled
Radio mode can also be toggled on and off via BTN_RADIO.
There are two options for sorting the songs: Artist (the default), which sorts the labels by artist, and Random, which randomly scrambles the titlestrips as they would normally appear on a real jukebox.
To set the song sort, add the SongSort parameter to the [Settings] section of JUKEBOX.INI as follows:
[Settings] SongSort = Random
- or -
SongSort = Artist