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Review of the Audiotron Stereo MP3 Component
What it is An MP3 player. But instead of using its own internal storage, it uses Samba shares that you can easily set up on any windows or Linux box for all data storage. This means that you can spread your MP3 collection over your LAN, use an external NAS or file server, but most importantly, not be constrained by the limits of disk space that go with any device that comes with its own storage. IO
The inputs/outputs are simple. Your basic ethernet port (you can assign an IP, or use DHCP). A pair of phone jacks (for HPNA networking which I've never used, nor do I intend to try). Power (you can deduce for yourself what that does). A pair of RCA audio outputs to plug into any stereo system. Best of all is a TosLink optical output so if you have a receiver that can do it, you can have an optical connection.
SetupSetting up the system was relatively easy. It took longer for me to set up Samba then the Audiotron. Just set a name and password, and make sure samba will let that guy in. Then make sure you have a folder named appropriately ("Music" will work. There is an option to search all folders but that is less then desirable). The atron boots up, uses DHCP to get an IP, scans your subnet, and if everything is configured, starts to get an index of MP3s from every server in your subnet set up to share MP3s. It was able to load all 6500 of my MP3s on my home network in just a few minutes. Note that if it loses power, it must reimport which on my lan took 5-6 minutes to import.
Upgrading the system is trivial . Download an image from the official website, and throw it in your music directory. and select the upgrade option. I did this almost immediately since the latest version has the web server interface that I desired to control the Audiotron from around the house.
I did manage to crash it several times after the upgrade. Once the crash was so severe that I had to restore to factory defaults. The only harm in this is that all of my favorites buttons were lost. I can blame this on the fact that I'm using a beta version of the code. I consider the crashes a tolerable short term problem, and worth it considering that the beta also gives me web control which is much easier then navigating using a knob.
Normal UseAfter booting, The front panel LED is mostly used to navigate your collection and select songs. You can do so by artist, title, genre, playlist. Everything is really easy, but somewhat slow. I'm not saying you can do it much better given the restraint of a 2 line LED visual output device and a knob. I'm just saying that you really want to use the web interface to do anything more complicated then selecting an album or artist.
The remote provides a variety of functions that you would expect. And it has a spacious 20 buttons for assigning favorites to. A favorite can be an artist (The Who!) a genre (All my rap mixed up) or just a disc (Daft Punk's Discovery). You can also define playlists, which are actually m3u files stored in your share. You have to make sure that the m3u's have only relative paths, DOS text file cr/lf, and backwards slashes. This is important because creating relatively wacky playlists is kinda a pain through this interface. The remote also lets You can also skip around in your playlist, or even within the MP3.
FidelityThe audio fidelity is really great, if by "Great" you really mean you want to show how bad MP3 encoding butchers audio. This is no criticism of the Audiotron, but you'll definitely here how MP3s just don't sound as good as the source CDs. I'll definitely be ripping CDs at a higher bit-rate.
ShortcomingsIt's just not totally ready yet for a power user although the The recent versions of the system have come much closer. A small feature which would be greatly appreciated is the functionality of the xmms-crossfade plugin. Such technology could presumably be easily integrated into a future version without a hardware upgrade. It's a relatively minor thing but it really adds something to many playlists to simply transition between songs. Sure its not as good as DJ who actually knows the start and end points of songs for proper mixing, but it usually removes those annoying pauses between songs. Somewhat related would be the ability to normalize volume of songs.
I wish the web interface would be reworked by someone who understands html interfaces. The system should offer the ability to create playlists of "Similiar" types. I should be able to add just a few songs, and the box should generate a list of similiar songs based on artist or genre. Right now creating a playlist is fairly tedious. Plus loading a web page often causes skipping in the playback. This is further complicated by the fact that it's output is really slow. I was getting like 8k a second even tho there really isn't any other traffic on the LAN. It wouldn't be so bad if I was getting pages much faster, but if you make your playlist be 'All Songs', you're going to wait awhile for the web page that contains that list. This is bad form.
There are lots of things that just seem messed up: for example I tried to map a few favorites keys to albums but it didn't want to play the CD in order even tho "Random" was off. They are played in order if you select the disc directly with random mode off. I think the favorite might randomize at assignment time. I suspect this is just an artifact of the beta build I was using.
In dream world this box would have TV interace, and 802.11b wireless support instead of regular ethernet. Of course this would double the price. At under $300, it's well within the range of typical consumer electronic gizmos so I doubt we'll see these options.
What it does bestIf you have several MP3 sources on your LAN, this is a great solution. Just set up samba shares on each box, and the audiotron will scan each of them and give you a single interface. Likewise, since it looks like a real stereo component, it means that you can let your PC just be a file server, and let this bad boy handle all MP3 playing chores. It won't stick out visually. And there aren't whirring fans to add more noise to your listening environment.
While the interface has rough edges, it's under three hundred bucks. And you can easily put one anywhere you have an ethernet drop. I doubt it would be worth placing one in a room where you already have a desktop PC to play songs directly on, but any room where you don't want a computer, have a stereo, and want access to your MP3s, this is simply a great way to do it. There are other ways you could do this, but this way is fairly elegant. And as a bonus, you can config the box via a web browser.
In short, I highly recommend this device. It fits right into the price performance functionality curve. And hopefully frequent releases will add more features and make it better. Now if only Turtle Beach would release the code under an open license... I'd love to see an XML/RPC interface so we could write front ends. Or tivo-style thumbs up/down controls for building more intelligent playlists.
So ThinkGeek sells these things if you're interested. I'm very pleased with mine. And I'll be more pleased when I get the 100 gig hard drive in my file server so I can rip the rest of my CDs.
All this is is winamp on some cheap but shiny looking box. You can accomplish the same thing (albeit without as pretty of a box) for 1/3 the cost using the 3com Audrey. $89.99 from tigerdirect, as opposed to $289 for the Audiotron.
After I had it pointed out to me, I realized that my Apex DVD player made an excellent MP3 CD stereo component. The only downside is that the TV has to be turned on to use any of the menus.
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I have 2 of these puppies connected to the LAN at my house, I'll probably buy a third soon. For me they are the perfect solution, I have 13G of mp3 on my server and the audiotron allows me to get that music to any room in my house (I have ethernet wall outlets in every room). The unit itself is small and has an optical outlet as well as analog. In the early days the indexing software had its limitations, however, TB has been very reponsive to feedback and is continually improving the firmware. The lastest Beta release actually supports Internet Radio if you have a broadband gateway.
I would have no hisitation in recommending the Audiotron, I use mine every day.
I bought one of these and I think its pretty damn sweet. I was in the market for something to play mp3s on my stereo. I already have a home network, I don't have a computer near my main stereo system and don't want one, and my wife has to be able to use it.
I did a lot of research, and most products wanted to include a hard drive (which I can supply much cheaper in my server) or the ability to rip (which I'd rather do via Lame). Also, I believe that Gateway sells this same unit for $199. Cheap compared to other choices.
It's not w/o its problems. The headphone jack is basically unusable it sounds so bad. RCA outputs are better, but I understand the digital output is best (I don't currently have digital in on my pre-amp). Also nice is that the firmware keeps getting better and better (it didn't even have an internal web server that the submitter complains about at first). Turtle Beach runs a mailing list and has been very responsive to suggestions from the early adopters (a lot of which, like me, are running on Samba!).
All in all its not the perfect convergence appliance, but its worked great in my situation.
I know this discussion is a bit long in the tooth by now, but I have a streaming MP3 player based on Apache::MP3, MySQL and Mason that works pretty well (for me at least.) Check out my project page here:
TVDiNNER Project Page
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
any computer in the house can get to it (well the macs can't, but I'm working on setting up some sort of mac compatible solution alongside samba).
For what it's worth, I've got all of my mp3s on a central NetBSD server. On the server I'm running Samba, netatalk, and NFS -- so any kind of computer can access the shares. I don't know what OS you're using for your server, but it shouldn't be too difficult to set the same thing up. And the protocols don't step on each other's toes at all.
(netatalk is especially nice; mounts the mp3 directory right on the desktop when I log in with the user who has that set as their home directory.)
--saint
Echo Audio uses a breakout box which has excellent sound quality. The breakout box doesn't use the same power supply as the PC, so you don't have any noise issues. They have a PCMCIA adapter in the works right now.
If you are serious about wanting OggVorbis support, then write a fixed-point decoder and make it LGPL. If it consumes low enough MIPS, it has the STRONG possibility of making it into portable players. Most players are based on ARM720T cores running at 74Mhz. If you can write a decoder that has a small RAM footprint (the code is in FLASH), then it is very likely it will start appearing in portable players.
Actually my home MP3 collection is totally legal.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
How are you transfering your vinyl to MP3s?
.wav files that I burn to CD, and encode to mp3.
I have a SBLive! sound card, and plug the line out of my stereo amp into the line-in of the sblive. I stay fairly up-to-date on the sblive driver, usually trying to use a recent one from cvs.
My primary tool is gramofile, which records, splits the tracks, and does some filtering to get rid of scratches and pops.
Sometimes gramofile doesn't figure out the splits properly (especially for live albums). For that, I use snd to edit the tracks and split them if necessary. snd can also do some other track editing if necessary.
When I'm done, I have a bunch of
I can't honestly tell you how good the results are with respect to quality of the sound, because my hearing is actually very bad (I wear a hearing aid). The results are acceptable to me.
Yeah, but unfortunately all [MP3.com amateur artists'] music sucks.
To paraphrase an Anonymous Coward: "You're a hack with no taste. All MP3.com artists bad?! go back to your cave, neanderthal."
Seriously, there are some gems in the MP3.com lineup; read the message boards.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A small feature which would be greatly appreciated is the functionality of the xmms-crossfade plugin.
I recon this sounds more interestings. More info also here in a good New Scientist article that also conducted an experiment like the Turing test, but with an audience of clubbers listening to the artificial DJ.
Unfortunately I think the HP has the patents on these algorithms, but I guess it maybe possible to licence...
-- Mike