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For audio, I have a device called the Audiotron from Turtle Beach. It can stream MP3's and full size wav files from Windows or SMB shares, and is really easy to use. It can also stream from some Internet radio stations. Very cool device, and it fits in perfectly with the rest of my black stereo stuff.

The Audiotron, from Turtle Beach. It can play MP3's up to 320 kbps, uncompressed WAV's and streaming radio stations. It has an optical connection, and a front display and remote. The only thing it doesn't have is native wireless, but that wasn't a problem for me. It's a fantastic device, and fits right at home with modern, black stereo equipment.

About the closest to what you want is a TB AudioTron -- no 802.11b support directly, but you can use a wireless hub or whatever to make it work. The AT is $250 + whatever for the wireless stuff. It does have a S/PDIF output, which most of the other network music appliances lack. It also supports a wider array of formats than just MP3 - but no OGG or FLAC support directly (you can use Samba's on-the-fly conversion to do it, if you have the CPU power on the server).

It's larger than the SliMP3, and doesn't have as bright of a display, but that's about it for the differences as best I can recall.

SliMP3 does not yet appear to support OGG (at least as far as I can tell from their website), which was one of the poster's requirements (and I dare say the most limiting, for an 'off the shelf' solution). Turtle Beach's Audiotron falls in the same category, everything the poster wants, except no OGG support.

The Audiotron is probably what you're looking for... except for the ogg. I don't think it does ogg, but if the slimp3 can do transcoding, this one can play raw .wav files, so maybe the server can decode the .ogg and the raw data can stream across the network (which could be better than transcoding)

Oh yeah, and it looks like a stereo component and has a high-contrast display.

The other one that has received quite a bit of press around here is the Slimp3 player. The slimp3 is a nice player, especially if you want something that you can hack, since the source code and architecture is all open.

If you want to make any wired network player wireless, there are products available.

A few other people have mentioned it but I will too. I have a Turtle Beach AudioTron and it totally kicks ass.

As far as features go, it's fairly basic. It plays MP3 and MP3 streams using SMB over Ethernet or phone LAN (whatever that is called). It has a good front panel and remote and a very good web interface.

I've had mine for a bit less than a year and it's been one of my favorite purchases since the day I got it.

If you get (or have) one and use Windows, also check out a little system tray app I wrote called ATTray which makes it quick to control the AT from your computer.

There are 3 network players that I know of, one which has been highly publicized on /. is the SliMP3. The other device, which has been around for quite some time is the Turtle Beach Audiotron. There is also one made by RIO.

I recently bought a network player after a few weeks of wrangling I decided to go with the Audiotron since I already had samba set up and I wanted and SPDIF connection which the Slimp3 does not offer. Anyway, you can check out my review.

A neat, albeit limited application, hack would be to get a cf 802.11 card running in one of these and be able to run mp3 off a fileshare.

Think of it as a wireless AudioTron. (Nearly) Infinite storage capacity with good mobility. I'd buy one.

They have this. It's called the Audiotron
I have one at home, and it rocks. Stick your files on a SMB share and Audiotron finds them and plays them.
And for less than a third of the price of this thing.

I'm slightly better off than the original poster: I have a 10 by 10 office with a door that closes. This allows me to play music without headphones and without disturbing my neighbours. To faciliate tunes I installed a Turtle Beach Audiotron, and I've never looked back---it's wonderful. I play it back through the external PC speakers (a little y-adapter works wonders); which is hi-fi enough for the office. :)

OK, I'm sold. I'd grab it and try it in a heartbeat, if only there were decent audio gear that could use the format. (Requiring a PC just to listen to my music is the whole reason I haven't switched over to MP3/Vorbis/whatever. Who the heck wants to wait for their stereo to boot before listening to music?

As soon as somebody comes up with a box like the excellent Turtle Beach Audiotron that can read ogg files directly off a network file server, I'm all over it. Until then, I don't care how good it is - it's too big a pain.

I have found one produce (it was on SlashDot a while back) called the AudioTron from Turtle Beach. It connects to your network (Ethernet or SPLN -- silly phone line networking), scans it, and plays your MP3's. It can index 30,000 MP3 files off your network and read standard M3U playlists.

Looks like a standard component, has a REMOTE, and not a bad looking interface.

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Why have an internal hard disk at all? It requires you to distrute the music to the edge. You don't have a backup and what you end up doing is paying for a very expensive hard disk.

What you want is the Audiotron.

For the same price, you could put several of them around your house and connect them to the linux computer you already have, which could be the central music server.

Basically, you plug it into your network through it's ethernet port and turn it on. It scans all SAMBA shares for mp3 music in /audio or /my music
and lets you select from the IR remote. The output is a SPDIF jack, RCA stereo jacks and a headphone jack. The list price is $299 (cheaper other places).

The only other thing I found was the dell digital audio reciever, but it's totally tied to windows and I think it requires real player installation. It's inexpensive though - $199.

Another interesting one is the harman kardon/zapstation. It can do the same thing, but with video as well. However, if you look deeper into the specs, it's another pile of crap: they try to control everything about the device. You can't load DVD's onto the hard disk, and it incorporates most of the other controlware tactics.

The closest thing I can find so far is the Audiotron from turle beach. It seems to be basicly a windows only interface but from the faq

As a reminder, we do not support any networking or configuration issues other than Windows, but here's a configuration that we've used with the AudioTron successfully. We did not notice any hicupps or sharing issues. We have successfully used the audiotron with Redhat 7.0, samba version 2.0.6 and dhcp 2.0pl5.

I agree without a doubt that so called "Internet Appliances" should have a ethernet connection. Yes, of course I realize that most americans do not have a ethernet network inside the home. However we need to use technology to help progress the state of networked america. I say follow the Audiotron's (http://www.audiotron.net) exampe, it not only has HPNA2 for people in homes without ethernet AND ethernet for homes that do. Providing this sort of option will not only satisy the needs of everyone but it will help set ethernet networks as the standard in homes across america as well as raising demand for quality broadband connections. With demand we will see higher saturation and lower prices. For a company to impliement ethernet is easy, the APIs are widely avaliable and the hardware is dirt cheap. I beleive that playing to the lowest common denominator is a good thing but I also beleive providing next level options is the key to the future.

ADSL and cable modem services are growing at an extremely high rate. We recently had cable modem service rolled out in our area and everyone I know snatched it up. More and more people have a home network to go along with it. Just check Amazon's electronics section -- the number one selling item is a hardware DSL/cable modem router. Its devices like this that make home networks extremely easy to implement.

There are some internet appliances that support broadband connections.

• Aplio/Pro -- hardware VoIP device
• Kerbango -- MP3 based internet "radio"
• Indrema -- linux set-top box (pvr, mp3, game console)
• Audiotron -- MP3 stereo component

Most of these aren't on the market yet, but are due by the end of the year. So it looks a lot like a case of RSN.