1/3/2006
Cool Network Music Players
I’m Posting this one again, because I think everyone needs one of these. I got one for Christmas and I love it. Here’s a neat gadget. I am always looking for new toys. I can use to play my music library. I have a Turtle Beach Audiotron in the family room hooked up to the stereo, and I love it. It’s great to have my whole library available to me at the touch of a button. This Christmas I’m looking to put some kind of digital music receiver in the bedroom. For the longest time I was sure it would be another Audiotron, but the Roku Soundbridge looks very promising. Like the Audiotron, it plays all the standard audio files (mp3, wmv, aac) as well as wave files, which is very important to me, as I have ripped many of my CD’s as wave files. I also wanted a unit that would be able to retrieve the music files from my computer with out the need to be logged on and/or running a particular piece of software. The Audiotron does this.
The Soundbridge uses a new(ish) collection of technologies to provide seamless serving of music files form the host computer. On a PC it uses Microsoft’s Media Connect which runs in the background as a service. It’s reasonably transparent, although I found out later it doesn’t run on Windows Server 2003, or support serving files on file shares. Alternatively one can choose to run Musicmatch and use their UPnP server, which works, but has a limited feature set as compared to the MS products. For the Macintosh audience, the Soundbridge integrates with Apples iTunes, and uses the Rendevous and other proprietary technologies. There is also an option to use Twonkyvision . Soundbridge can also use the Open Source SlimServer, which gives you access to playing ogg files as well, but is not supported by Roku. (but it works just fine) For more info the server stuff see this link.
As far as DRM (yuck) goes it depends on which server you choose to use, however it seems that it won’t play DRM protected AAC files purchased on iTunes music store. It seems this is Apples doing as they won’t allow protected music to be streamed to third-party devices. The Soundbridge comes in three models, the M500 ($179), M1000 ($249) and the M2000 ($499). There is essentially no difference in the operation or features, but the M2000 has a 12″ 512×32 vacuum-fluorescent screen that displays 4 lines of text. The M1000 has a smaller 280×16 2-line vacuum-fluorescent screen. Both units offer IR remote control, wired and WiFi (via compact flash card) connectivity.
Other Music Machines:
