Some ideas show up so simple that you almost miss how good they really are. Melladee was one of those for me. A little program, I wrote a few years ago, it plays MP3s, it shows JPGs, and it keeps the two in sync. That is the whole thing. No menu maze, no software trial, no popups asking for an account. Put your photos in one folder, your music in another, hit run, and the room suddenly feels like a celebration.
People use it for graduation parties, birthdays, memorials, retirement gatherings, and anything that needs a slideshow that feels personal instead of corporate. The community edition still lays it all out cleanly. Clone the repo, drop your media in the two folders, and go. The documentation in the file says exactly that without any fuss.
Sometimes the simplest ideas get better when the right piece of hardware shows up. Micro Center put the Raspberry Pi Zero W on sale for $8. This thing is tiny, silent, and perfect for Melladee. A one gigahertz CPU, half a gig of RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a mini HDMI port. The product sheet reads like a checklist of everything Melladee needs and absolutely nothing it doesn’t. You plug it into a TV, add power, drop your pictures and music on a microSD card, and that is the whole setup. Melladee turns this eight dollar board into a little magic box that plays the soundtrack of someone’s life. The kind of tech you can hand to a cousin who knows nothing about computers. The kind of thing you can tuck behind a monitor at a birthday party and forget about.
There is something satisfying about a tool that does one job well. Melladee never tried to be a production studio. It just lets moments breathe. When people see it running, they do not talk about the script or the Raspberry Pi. They talk about the memories on the screen and the music filling the room. That is the good stuff.
Eight bucks for the Pi, a few bucks for a microSD card, and the slideshow takes care of itself. Some ideas are cheap to build but priceless when they work. This is one of them.