MusicBox Radio

The block does something while it plays

The music box front now carries a record that spins while a station is playing, its label cycling through neon, and both sides carry a five band spectrum display built out of stepped LEDs.

The bars are driven by a real FFT of the audio rather than a canned animation. Audio is analysed as it is handed to OpenAL, but OpenAL is sitting on roughly three quarters of a second of queued buffers, so a naive visualiser runs almost a second ahead of the music. The analysis is instead queued alongside the audio and advanced by OpenAL's own report of which buffers it has finished, so a bar moves at the moment you hear the sound that moved it.

A box you cannot hear stays dark rather than miming, since the levels come from the stream your client is actually playing.

Speakers

A new black speaker block relays a music box to somewhere else. Use a speaker on a music box to pair it, then place it. The link is stored on the item, so a whole stack can be paired once and then put up around a room. A placed speaker can be re-pointed by using it, which lists the music boxes within 24 blocks and gives it its own volume.

Speakers are proximity sources at their own position, and their cone is pushed out of the cabinet by the low end of whatever is playing.

Pairing is resolved server side and copied onto the speaker, so a speaker keeps working when its box is far away, in an unloaded chunk, or in another dimension.

Crafted from wool around a note block, with an iron ingot below.

One connection per station

A music box and the speakers relaying it now share a single decoded stream rather than each opening their own.

This was necessary for speakers to be usable at all. Two independent connections to the same station arrive at different points in the broadcast, so two speakers in one room would have comb filtered into something that sounded like a broken echo. It also means the mod holds one connection per station no matter how many blocks are playing it, which matters because plenty of stations cap connections per address.

An emitter joining a stream already in progress fills to the same buffer depth as one already playing, so placing a speaker next to a running one does not leave it permanently offset.

Pairing no longer needs a sneak

Using headphones or a speaker on a music box pairs them on an ordinary right click. Previously the box was offered the click first and opened its panel, which ate the interaction before the item ever saw it, so the only way through was to sneak. The box now steps aside when you are holding something pairable.

This is a behaviour change for headphones, which needed the sneak in 1.1.0. The sneak still works, so nothing anyone had learned has been taken away.

Volume sliders stay where you put them

Both panels read the volume back from the server every frame so they pick up changes made by someone else. That read was overriding the slider while it was being dragged, and again for the length of a round trip after it was let go, so on the speaker panel the knob sprang straight back and the control looked dead. The read is now held off while you are mid-change.

Volume is also sent as you drag rather than only when you let go, so you can hear what you are choosing.

Downloads

• musicboxradio-1.19.2-1.2.0.jar for Forge
• musicboxradio-1.19.2-fabric-1.2.0.jar for Fabric

Both require Minecraft 1.19.2 and Java 17. Curios and Trinkets are optional.