Activating the R-Box Pearl Software on Linux (Ubuntu)
Quick Start Instructions

To get your R-Box Pearl software up and playing music quickly on Linux, follow these steps below.

Prerequisites

The following are the prerequisites for this article: 

• Active RadioSparx Account - You must have an active account at the RadioSparx website to play music on the R-Box Pearl software.  Your account must be activated either as Free Trial account (which happens by default when you first sign-up), or with a paid subscription. You can sign-up on the website homepage, or talk to a sales associate for assistance.
  
  
• You must install the latest version of JRE and/or JDK.
  
  
• Additionally install OpenJFX (this may not be necessary, depending on which version of Linux you are using).
  
  
• From the site http://www.ubuntuupdates.org, download and install manually packages libavutil51, libavformat53, libavcodec53, and libvpx1.
  
  
• Download RBox software from https://www.radiosparx.com/software/rbox.zip, unzip it into an empty folder and assign it to an executable file.
  
  
• Run RBox: Java -jar rbox.jar
  
  
• The helper. jar file will appear in the folder along with RBox. It must also be made executable.
  
  
• From the terminal run:  java -jar helper.jar

You must configure the player settings for the software to be able to connect to your RadioSparx account, automatically log in, and commence playing the music.  For the  R-Box Pearl software, to access the player's Settings menu, do the following:

• Click on the three dots in the upper-right corner of the software app's user interface.

The surf to the RadioSparx website, click on the Account option at the top right and then go into the Player Settings option. Or, if you're setting this up for a user under a multi-user account, go into Account, then Users, and then into Player Settings for the affected user.  Then perform these steps:

• Step 1 -  Player Type - Change the Player Type field to "R-Box Pearl (Hardware or Software)".  Don't forget to save this setting after performing the two steps below.
• Step 2 -  Device ID - Enter the Device ID from the Player Settings screen into the corresponding field in the R-Box Pearl settings option and save it.
• Step 3 -  Security Token - Enter the Security Token from the Player Settings screen into the corresponding settings field in the R-Box Pearl and save it.

On the RadioSparx website, make sure to save the Player Settings screen changes by clicking the "Save Changes" button in the upper right corner.



Test Playback

After the software updates, click on the PLAY button from the main screen of the R-Box software and the Pop Vocal station should commence playing immediately in streaming mode.

Schedule Your Music

Configure the desired music to play via the Custom Schedule feature.  By default, the R-Box Pearl plays in streaming mode, but by accessing the "Advanced Settings" section of your Custom Schedule settings screen, you can change the operational mode to use Store-and-Forward (Caching mode) instead.  

Note: In the upcoming new version of the RadioSparx website, the Streaming versus Caching control has been moved from the Custom Schedule Settings screen to the Player Settings screen.

Automatic Play

The R-Box Pearl software is engineered to be a non-stop music player, so when you reboot the device, it will automatically begin playing after the reboot.  It tries to always play music as much as possible to require minimal human intervention.  

To make it stop playing at night time, simply configure a "Stop Event" for your Custom Schedule to take effect at a particular time of night, and when that time arrives and the last song finishes, the R-Box will go into sleep mode and begin a countdown of the hours and minutes until the next configured music event for the following morning arrives, and then it will automatically resume playback.


Update Software

The software will automatically update itself as we release new versions.  If you ever need to manually update to the latest version, click the 3 dots in upper-right corner and there click the UPDATE option.  The latest version of the software will download and should install on top of your existing version, and then restart and resume playback all automatically.

Player Monitoring

 By default, in both streaming and store-and-forward modes, the R-Box periodically sends a signal to the web server to inform that it is active and playing.  The required upstream traffic for this is negligible and provides the capability for you to monitor all of your R-Box players via the monitoring system of RadioSparx.  

In store-and-forward mode, if your Internet service happens to go down for some time period, the R-Box will not be able to connect to the server to report its status, and hence a "down player" alert may occur on the monitoring system.  However, since in store-and-forward mode the R-Box plays music from the files that are stored locally on the R-Box, there will be no music interruption and nobody in the store / restaurant / service location will even realize the Internet is down.  For a business environment, this is ideal, hence it is highly recommended that you utilize the store-and-forward mode at all times.

Custom Ads

For clients utilizing our PRO Plan, if desired you can also upload and configure Custom Ads -- they work fine in both streaming and caching modes.   

---