My youth group has been a subscriber of Interlinc for several years now, so they’ve accumulated quite a large Christian music library. It used to be made available for students to borrow CDs, but apparently several problems arose: 1) CDs were lost, broken, scratched or not returned; 2) Kids just ripped them to their iPods and returned the CD. Granted, I’ve only been at this church for about 6 months now, so I’m not too familiar with the old system that was in place, but nonetheless it ceased to exist by the time I arrived. Rather than letting hundreds of CDs go to waste, I devised my own plan.

Inspired by all the positive response to my post on Simplify Media, I found Jinzora, a free open-source web-based music jukebox. In my true geek-like fashion, I set it up on my church’s server and integrated it into my youth group’s website where the students can now stream their favorite Christian music 24/7. No more checking out CDs, losing them under the bed or copying them several times over.

Click the screen shot below for a clearer picture of what it looks like. Nice, eh?

(Sorry, the library is available only to manually approved members of my church’s youth group.)

Posted on August 7, 2007