Review of the Audiotron Stereo MP3 Component

My quest for the perfect MP3 player has been ongoing. A few weeks ago I decided to try out Turtle Beach's Audiotron. Unlike most other attempts, this one doesn't have any internal storage: instead it has an ethernet port and mounts a Samba (or I suppose windows) file share. Is it all I'd dreampt about? The short review is that for the price, and for what it sets out to do, this is an awesome box... with some caveats.

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.

Setup

Setting 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 Use

After 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.

Fidelity

The 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.

Shortcomings

It'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 best

If 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.

Comments

Re:fp?

[OblongPlatypus]

No, I'm afraid yours is post #2420219. Better luck next Slashdot.

MP3 Players

[mikers]

To my own end of trying to find a decent player, I tried two... After investigating about 4 different ones.

My requirements were:
- Lots of MP3s, no point in a player that can only handle one CD and then needs a computer connection for more
- Long battery life (ie. >7 hours on one charge)
- Flexible, programmable, configurable (everything from the playlist to the kitchen sink)
- Backlit
- Upgradable firmware
- 2 minutes antiskip memory or better

To that end, I checked out the TDK Mojo, a MiSEL player, the Rio Volt, the AVC Soul and offerings from Philips (the father of the CD).

The TDK mojo had pretty much all the features except for buggy firmware - that could not be upgraded. Nice LCD display, good battery life.

The MiSEL is not really available in any quantities in North American yet.

The AVC is the company that makes player for Rio-Sonicblue (Volt) and iRiver. iRiver (Korea) designed the player, and it is built by AVC who also gets to sell some under its own name. The Volt is most similar to the iRiver IMP-100 (not available in North America). The nice thing is that iRiver firmware AND Sonicblue firmware will both work in the player - and it is backwards upgradable.

I settled on the Volt after trying it out for about 3 hours and here is why:
- Nice backlight that is configurable (hello Indiglo), can be set to off, a few seconds or on all the time
- Batteries last and last (7-10 hours typical on a fresh pair)
- Good sound quality
- Lots of firmware of different kinds and features around
- Does CDR, CDRW, 74, 80 minute
- Handles MP3 (CBR, VBR) (22050 - 44100 hz, mono and stereo, bitrates up to 320kBps)
- Handles Windows Media files (non-secure only)
- Tons of configuration - hold down the EQ button and you get a huge menu tree that lets you configure scrolling speeds, directory navigation features, playlists)
- Does M3U playlist files
- ID3 tag or file name selection for display
- Count down or count up on song timer
- Saving playlists for up to 10 CDs and remembers them when different CDs are inserted
- Resume remembers between up to 10 cds which song and how far through the song you were in
- Spins down the CD after reading music for 3 minutes ahead.

Downsides:
- Even with 2 minutes anti-skip you can't take it jogging. Even with walking - if its in your pocket - it will stop after 2 minutes
- Rayovac recharagable alkalines have to be 5 charges or else they don't have the juice to power it (1 hour typical on an old pair)

Conclusion:
- For a player that costs a bit of money (~150US, 300CAN) it has a hell of a lot of features. And its upgradable

Re:What I'd like...

[miracles]

something like that exists, it's the Archos Jukebox . It's a 6Gb portable mp3 player. There's also a site out there that can convert it to a 20Gb player for another $100 ... i just can't remember which site right now.

Isn't this off-topic!?!

[LoudMusic]

This has nothing to do with networked mp3 players ... especially the AudioTron!

It is informative, but come on, he's so offtopic.

~LoudMusic