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.

It's too expensive for what it does

[ilsie]

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.

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[Katan]

Its not fair to compare the cost to a 3com Audrey however. Its been discontinued by 3com, and the price of 89.99 reflects that.

When the Audrey was new and under production, it was like $499. That doesn't quite compare. I guess if you consider the one time value of the Audrey, then I can definently understand.

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[kilgore_47]

I'm not usually one to lash out at Taco & Crew, but this is just a blatant plug for a product that their company is selling (VALinux/ThinkGeek/Slashdot/Whatever). He didn't even mention the connection between the companies, like he usually does!

I think this thing is a big waste of money. I keep all my mp3s on a samba share, so 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). It's really pretty simple to run a cable from the back of a pc to the back of a receiver, and I don't see what this shiny box is going to give me that my current setup won't (except a $289 hole in my wallet).

The optical output seems cool, until you realize that your playing mp3s anyway so the fidelity loss is already there.

It seems like Taco, of all people, would adovcate building your own setup (using linux boxen, naturally) over using a buggy embedded system like this.

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[jgerman]

Hopefully soon I'll be able to do the same with my $40 dreamcast ( *cough* plus the ridiculous amount I'll be spending on a BBA ), but I'm willing to spend the money on this because there's other things I can do with it, strangely enough I can also use my dreamcast to play games . Of course once I get a dreamcast set up and sharing a drive on the network, I'll probably extend my mp3 idea to include ogg and hopefully, vcd and divx. That'd be cool to serve movies off of my file server.

Man rereading this I'm definitely starting to feel like more of a geek than usual.

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[vanguard]

I was just looking at these things the other day. I'm really thinking about buying one. When I saw his review I thought, "Cool, at last some news for nerds."

According to me, /. has focused too much on privacy and politics. They are important but I need a little more UI debates, geek toys, etc.

What you see as a blatant plug I saw as a nice change of pace. Anyway, I liked his choice topics.

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[DevNova]

www.audreyhacking.com

www.linux-hacker.net

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[Whatever Fits]

Does it come with an MP3 player on it? I didn't see it listed on the specifications or in the manual? If not, how can you load one? Isn't it a little beyond the average user to load software on one of these? As I recall, it is a protected system.

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[Hawks]

I keep all my mp3s on a samba share, so 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).

Just FYI, if your macs are running OSX.1, they can mount CIFS/Samba shares natively. In the "Connect to Server" dialog use a url like:

smb://server/share

Enjoy

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[Anonymous Coward]

You want one of these. Really you do. You don't want to pay $300? Fine, don't. Walk yourself into Best Buy and get one. They have them for $150. They don't know how to market/sell them there, so they're a sale/clearance item that keeps getting restocked.

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[turbod]

No offense, but you feel as if everyone should have h4x0r boxes in every room of the house. NOT!

A box in the "den" must:

1) Make no sound.
2) Really needs a business-like VFD with brightness controls (not some cheesy LCD)
3) Runs efficiently (unless its a PA and under duress) so it can be left on continuously
4) Engineered as a component, not slack like a audio card, and has true RCA level outs, not 3 levels of possible volume control (typical: software control in the decoder, level control on the card, and finally a volume control on the PA/Speakers - instead, match RCA level out, and that's it)
5) Low noise - nothing about any of the Linux fanless boxes I have seen says anything about "high quality audio out" (some of us do VBR rips so there is almost no drop in quality)

While I also doubt that the Audiotron can cut it, your solution will get nowhere close to the proper levels of refinement.

Basically, this calls for a CPU/decoder/ethernet/dac/ram/rom on one chip, to minimize radiated noise. Basically, this is a description of the dolby ac-3 decoders in a modern receiver (minus the ethernet adapter - but you can do a optical feed in -- maybe thats where the net-sprites like Audiotron should come in). So why aren't we ripping to AC3? It's miles ahead of WMA and MP3 anyway.... I mean, how often do you see a movie with multitrack MP3 or WMA audio?

TurboD

Re:It's too expensive for what it does

[jacrawf]

(well the macs can't, but I'm working on setting up some sort of mac compatible solution alongside samba)

You can use Netatalk to get sharing working with the Macs as well, but there is something of a problem. Most of the versions of Netatalk that I have used will not share files with names that are too long. (I have a bunch of MP3s with very descriptive file names and the limit on file name sizes in MacOS 9 is something around 31 characters or so.) They simply don't show up in the Finder.

If you are using MacOS 9, I really highly recommend you pick up a copy of DAVE and bag setting up Netatalk. DAVE works marvellously for me (and if you ever need to burn a CD especially for your Mac on a *nix box, mkisofs understands the files DAVE uses to keep the extra metadata and resource forks that MacOS's HFS has -- quite convenient for burning CDs full of Mac software), does not have a problem with long file names, and I highly recommend it.

If you are an OS X user, either pick up a copy of Sharity if you are stuck with Mac OS X 10.0.4, or just use MacOS X 10.1 which has an included SMB client. MacOS X can also mount NFS exports, so there is always that alternative as well. I haven't had tremendous luck with Sharity, though.

Apex DVD Player

[Bonker]

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.

Re:Apex DVD Player

[maniac11]

The only downside is that the TV has to be turned on to use any of the menus.

This might actually be a kinda nice feature... My stereo components are an integral part of my home theater.

If you had a WebTV (? -- yuk, right?) or another similar product (no direct experience of TV-based web interfaces) you could probably control this device via its web interface on your tube.

Re:Apex DVD Player

[kilgore_47]

What about people running BSD or Linux etc on Dreamcasts? Isn't the dreamcast powerfull enough to play mp3s?

What about ps2?

Once you get these things on your lan, a whole bunch of new options open up...

Nice music library

[Reality Master 101]

was able to load all 6500 of my MP3s on my home network in just a few minutes.

Since we know that all MP3s are only backup copies of what we have already purchased, I'm sure that Taco actually paid for all that music and the musicians were properly paid for their effort. :)

I know this because Slashdot has always told me that Napster et al actually increases music purchases.

Re:Nice music library

[barnaclebarnes]

Well given that I have 1500 mp3's and thats only about 1/10 of my CD collection (which I paid for)6500 mp3's is not that many.

Yes some of actually buy music...

Re:Nice music library

[Cuthalion]

There are plenty of musics which are legally distributed via MP3. http://www.mp3.com contains several examples.

Re:Nice music library

[nebkor]

please:/mp3/doyle> find . -type f -print |grep -v other_peoples |wc -l
3539

This represents about 90% of my personal CD collection, encoded as MP3s. I've only been buying CDs for a couple years. Whether or not the musicians were properly compensated for their music which I purchased is another issue.

Oh, and for the record:
please:/mp3/doyle> find . -type f -print |grep other_peoples |wc -l
616

Re:Nice music library

[Reality Master 101]

At an average of 8 songs per CD, 6500 MP3s would be over 800 albums (about $10K worth). That's a lot of albums. If you say you have 1875 albums, I'll take your word for it, but that doesn't mean that 800 isn't a lot. I would say that's way above average.

If I had to take a guess, I would say the average person has 50-100 albums.

Re:Nice music library

[TrumpetPower!]

was able to load all 6500 of my MP3s on my home network in just a few minutes.

Since we know that all MP3s are only backup copies of what we have already purchased, I'm sure that Taco actually paid for all that music and the musicians were properly paid for their effort. :)

I'll believe him on this one...but, figuring about fifteen tracks per CD, and about fifteen dollars per CD, we also know that Taco has given the RIAA about $6500 dollars.

Not counting, of course, the CDs he has yet to rip.

And we wonder where they get the money and power to ram through the DMCA and SSSCA....

b&

Re:Nice music library

[Reality Master 101]

If I had to take a guess, I would say the average person has 50-100 albums.

In fact, that's probably way high. I bet if you count only the people who have at least 1 album, the average is only 20 albums. If you count people who never buy music, it's probably much lower than that.

Re:Nice music library

[fobbman]

If Taco was this pure wouldn't have have instead backed up his home CD collection to .ogg format instead?

Re:Nice music library

[Score Whore]

I got 2464 tracks on 201 CDs. All legally mine and encoded by me.

Re:Nice music library

[Brainboy]

You also forgot MP3 that are radio captures. I like to record Howard Stern on MP3s so that I have all those funny songs that are even released on a CD or the Internet.

Re:Nice music library

[remou]

and the musicians were properly paid for their effort. :)

I don't f-king think so! They got ripped off by the record labels...

Re:Nice music library

[madajb]

I was thinking more along the lines of:

Who has time to rip 6500 MP3's !?

I guess all those unemployed .com'ers have lot's of free time. =)
-ajb

Re:Nice music library

[TheTomcat]

I've actually heard (IRL) Taco speak of his CD collection (GeekPride, Boston, April 1, 2000).

Mentioned ripping it, and having actual stacks of CDs laying around the office/complex.

I suspect he does actually have 6500 tracks.. that's only around 500 CDs. <shrug>

Re:Nice music library

[Reality Master 101]

I don't f-king think so! They got ripped off by the record labels...

That may or may not be true, but they don't get zero.

Re:Nice music library

[nstenz]

I seem to recall most of my CDs having an average of 11 or 12 songs. That would make it closer to 540 albums- quite a difference.

Re:Nice music library

[firewort]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "Average"--

I own 500 CDs, kept in 5 of those "100 cd binders," and I'd own more, but I've stopped buying CDs or DVDs in light of Hillary Rosen and Jack Valenti's public comments.

I don't get music from Napster, KaZaa, or any other file-sharing network, I simply listen to the discs I currently own, what's broadcast on radio, or what I feel like playing on my guitar and recording to hard drive.

Sure, there are releases I've been tempted by, but I'll continue denying the record and movie houses my money until they stop presuming that I'm inclined to commit acts they'd like labelled as 'criminal.'

I always figured my CD collection was average, my friends own more than a thousand!

Re:Nice music library

[tmark]

Don't forget, since much of many albums is chaff, Taco probably did not rip the whole CD and so his presumed album count is probably much higher than your estimate. I own MANY CDs where I would only bother ripping one or two songs, and more than a few where I wouldn't bother ripping any. As far as I'm concerned you would have to be a fool to rip crappy songs from an album...it sort of defeats the purpose.

But the precise assumptions here don't matter. You and I and everyone else *know* that in all probability Taco has some MP3s he did NOT pay for.

Re:Nice music library

[AtaruMoroboshi]

averaging 8 songs per cd is ridiculous. Most cds have more than that, especially if you are into hip-hop, punk or techno.

I have techno cds that have 50 to 99 tracks of indexed points in a mix.

I have many hardcore punk cds that have 99 tracks (and are only 60 minutes long!)

I also have a bunch of classical and japanese noise releases that are 60 to 70 minutes of stuff, with just one track.

And i own about 800 cds, and 1000+ vinyl (lps, 7"s, and odd sized ones too.)

When music is your life, it's very easy to quickly accumulate hundreds of cds. I didn't even buy cds regularly till 1997, cuz i was a strictly vinyl guy. Now i'm a strictly cd and mp3's guy...

Re:Nice music library

[AtaruMoroboshi]

Really, albums with lots of crap songs are not albums worth buying. I'd say i like 90 to 100 percent of the songs on the best 50% of my record collection.

I like every song Aphex Twin has done since 1995 for example, and 90% of everything before 1995. That's about 14 cds worth of stuff.

If the music you're listening to has that much badness, you should consider looking into more independant music, where more interesting and compelling things are being done.

Only in the great world of corporate pop/rock/rap do albums with one or two great songs come out. Most indie music is pretty consistent; it either sucks or it rocks.

Re:Nice music library

[Null_Packet]

I can affirm as much as any stranger that Malda has legitimate copies. I remember back in 1997 (maybe 1998) when he mentioned in a story that he was working on a project for quickly naming mp3's before the whole CDDB thing was big. He mentioned in an e-mail he sent me on the side that said he had a large collection.

Besides that, some of us really do want normail cd's to rip for fair use, and aren't just giving it lip service to keep a free supply of mp3's coming. I for one have a couple thousand mp3's and they've never seen the light of napster.

Re:Nice music library

[rudedog]

Hmm, I have 4700 mp3s in my collection, and they were all ripped from cd's and albums that I legitimately paid for. I have never been to napster. I've run gnutella only a couple of times, and I've never been to any other music sharing site. so I would guess that less than a dozen of those mp3s are "illegitimate".

And that's only my CD library. I am now starting the (slow and tedious) task of migrating my vinyl library to mp3. When that's done, I expect the number of mp3s to triple to around 12000.

Re:Nice music library

[J3zmund]

I'm sure that Taco actually paid for all that music and the musicians were properly paid for their effort. :)

The recording industry does not own all of the music in the world. Plenty of bands allow fans to record their live concerts and distribute them freely. I'm sure you were being cute, but if you're gonna make Taco jokes, you should know what you're talking about. Have you ever read Taco's website? He's a DeadHead. He can copy live Dead shows and give them away without paying any royalties, funny guy. Not all music is owned by the recording industry.

Re:Nice music library

[ErikZ]

How are you transfering your vinyl to MP3s?

Re:Nice music library

[JdV!!]

postgres=> select count(*) from track;
count
-----
6239
(1 row)

postgres=> select count(*) from album;
count
-----
477
(1 row)

All legal ;-)

JdV!!

Re:Nice music library

[CmdrTaco]

Actually my home MP3 collection is totally legal.

Re:Nice music library

[rudedog]

How are you transfering your vinyl to MP3s?

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 .wav files that I burn to CD, and encode to mp3.

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.

Re:Nice music library

[koreth]

mp3.com
emusic.com

Between those two sites you can easily accumulate 6500 legitimate MP3s without ever touching a CD. Well, "easily" if you have a broadband connection, anyway. And that's not counting all the garage band home pages across the net with MP3s they want you to distribute widely so they get name recognition.

As for buying CDs, I've been doing that on eBay a lot recently. If you don't require the latest releases you can easily stock up on CDs for less than half what you'd pay at a retail store. Again, all perfectly legal, though if your goal is to make sure the artists get their $.002 from the record label for each album sold, it's not so hot.

Re:Nice music library

[NMerriam]

I have about 800 CDs, and no it doesn't cost the thousands of dollars that people are calculating here.

Most college towns have used CD stores -- I would go in every week and get 10-20 CDs for $20-$50.

I ripped the entire collection twice! I had a hard drive failure the week after I finished the first time, which was fine because I re-ripped at a much higher quality and am glad I did.

My initial rip was at 160 CBR, and some songs didn't quite translate so well. My current collection (took about two months to rip, I had two spare boxes just doing ripping) is all encoded at 190-256 VBR and there aren't more than a handful of songs where you can tell it isn't the original CD.

Its nowhere near as impossible as some think, and a lot cheaper than buying 2 or more of the 500-disc CD jukeboxes. Plus I just the NEX II Mp3 player, which takes IBM microdrives -- 1 gig of my favorite tunes with me on plane trips in the size of a pack of cards!

Re:Nice music library

[RainbowSix]

quote

Actually my home MP3 collection is totally legal.

/quote

I think that means that his home ogg collection and non-home collection aren't :)

Re:Nice music library

[festers]

It's nice to see such well documented, scientific data presented on Slashdot. Could you please post a link to your study?

Re:Nice music library

[zhensel]

Don't forget his extensive collection of WMA files - he's often ranted on his dual-booting ways!

Re:Nice music library

[moheeb]

I would only bother ripping one or two songs, and more than a few where I wouldn't bother ripping any.

You may be listening to the wrong type of music. I like almost every song on each of my 100+ CDs. I normally don't waste my money on a CD unless I actually like the music on it.

Re:Nice music library

[Hektor_Troy]

Let's not forget, that he didn't mention the collection in his car, at work, at his parrents, at his girlfriend/boyfriend (hey - what do I know??) etc ...

Actually, 6500 mp3s "isn't that much" ... last I checked, my older brother had 800 CD-albums (no singles) ... that'd come out to some 8000+ mp3s/oggs/wmas/whatever.

Me - I have like ... 10 cds I think ... not counting the three CDs with Sci Fi sound tracks I threw out this morning ... turned out NOT to be the original songs/themes but what I'd venture was a third rate band or something remake ... try to imagine any Star Wars theme made by maybe 20 amateur musicians ... my ears still hurt :-/

Re:Nice music library

[pcmills]

111011111111

Re:Nice music library

[Pope]

Good info at the MP3 FAQ site.

That's how I learned how to do it.

Re:Nice music library

[Loki77]

It's good that you're standing up for what you believe in...

...however, if this kind of idea takes off, how long do you think it's going to be till the record companies show that they are not selling as much as they used to... and then blame it on P2P music networks.

Man, what a screwed up world.

Re:Nice music library

[firewort]

Thanks,

And, they already are- Didn't you see the RIAA announcement of profit loss post-Napster, where they decided that the loss MUST be due to CD-RW sales?

I burn occasional data backups and CD-R of the photos I take with my digital camera, or music I record with my guitar and microphones, but I haven't bothered to try and backup my music CDs.

I've attempted to convince my friends to join me in my boycott, and succeeded in getting my brother to not buy DVDs, but everyone else doesn't seem to understand- they're still saying "Don't worry, the geeks will defeat those protection measures!" -- my telling them "If you change the laws, the geeks won't have to!" seems to have little effect.

Re:Nice music library

[Reality Master 101]

I was wondering if posting this joke would get Taco to post on his own site. :)

Re:Nice music library

[mkb]

though if your goal is to make sure the artists get their $.002 from the record label for each album sold, it's not so hot.

Assuming the CD is not a bootleg, and the original purchaser did not steal it from the record label, then the artist already got his two cents from the label at the time of original purchase. If artists (and labels!) were paid for secondary sales, they would be getting four cents instead of two.

Re:Nice music library

[unitron]

"Actually my home MP3 collection is totally legal."

Perspiring minds want to know, where other than home do you keep your non-legal MP3 collection? :-)

Re:Nice music library

[Brad Wilson]

At the moment, I have about 5900 files (still in the ripping process; I expect to have about 10k when I'm done). That'll be a sizeable portion of my collection, perhaps half. Between my wife and I, we have amassed about 1500 audio CDs.

*shrug* High file count != illegal Napster user (FWIW, all mine are WMA because of the better quality at smaller file size, so none of them could've come from Napster ).

Re:Nice music library

[jooniqzb1tch]

wish I had some mod points for you.
and yes, richard d. james rocks !

Re:Nice music library

[evilviper]

Wah HA HA HA HA HA....
Please, Stop, that's too funny...

But seriously, I don't think RIAA really cares what you have to say on an anonymous forum, while NOT under oath.

Waste of Money

[Mr. Eradicator]

So basically this is just a remote control for Winamp. What else could this possibly add to any software mp3 player? Who cares if it hooks up between your computer and stereo. You can just use a moderately-priced sound card to do that.

The claim that this can be used with the highest-quality sound equipment is hilarious. What is the compression on mp3s? Do you _really_ think mp3s sound nearly as good as a good CD player? No matter how tweaked out this bad boy is, mp3s will still have hisses and skips that can be dangerous to powerful, quality audio setups.

This is not a flame. This is a reality check.

Re:Waste of Money

[shpoffo]

Do you _really_ think mp3s sound nearly as good as a good CD player?

or a good clean wax recording - but i'm sure i'll be flamed for not prophetizing digital wonderfulness.

Did you kow that source of most data is analog? Not too many cows that _moo_ in an ISO codex....

-shpoffo

Re:Waste of Money

[quintesson]

So basically this is just a remote control for Winamp. What else could this possibly add to any software mp3 player? Who cares if it hooks up between your computer and stereo. You can just use a moderately-priced sound card to do that.

For one computer, perhaps you are right, but this thing would be great for say... setting up in the common room on a dorm floor and connecting to the stereo, so that the MP3s of everybody on the LAN can be accessed from that point.

Re:Waste of Money

[gmhowell]

It's also great for those of us who don't want pc's in our living rooms.

Re:Waste of Money

[Webmonger]

So basically this is just a remote control for Winamp. What else could this possibly add to any software mp3 player? Who cares if it hooks up between your computer and stereo. You can just use a moderately-priced sound card to do that.

If you use it like winamp, it will work like winamp. Try reading the article:

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.

Sheesh.

The claim that this can be used with the highest-quality sound equipment is hilarious

Higher bitrate and variable-bitrate encodings sound pretty good to me. I've got decent speakers on my desktop, and I find MP3 sounds adequate if you take a little care. I would expect the same quality from this component.

No matter how tweaked out this bad boy is, mp3s will still have hisses and skips that can be dangerous to powerful, quality audio setups.

Have you forgotten that CDs skip? And tape hisses? And yet, such equipment has been used in stereos for more than a decade, with no systems damaged as a result. How can MP3 be "dangerous"?

Re:Waste of Money

[kochsr]

i actually have one of these... it runs windows ce. i have tried various ways of getting mp3s into my stereo. this LOOKS like a stereo component... and it isn't loud like a computer is... plus it actually works pretty well

Re:Waste of Money

[Rob Parkhill]

>...mp3s will still have hisses and skips that can
>be dangerous to powerful, quality audio setups.

If -any- audio source is "dangerous" to your equipment, then you don't exactly have a "quality" audio setup. Sorry.

Re:Waste of Money

[Telek]

The claim that this can be used with the highest-quality sound equipment is hilarious.

Although I agree that this is a COMPLETE waste of money (if it was $50 I'd consider it), I think that you need to define a few things before I'd agree with that statement. For starters, where did you get the MP3s? If you just grabbed all of the 128kbit mp3s that you could find off the internet and randomly play them, sure possibly. If you have a $5000 stereo system, sure, probably. But I do all of my rips at (at least) 192kbit/s VBR with lame, and I don't get pops and clicks, and I have a $1400 stereo system that they sound wonderful in. If you listen carefully yes, it's obvious that it's an MP3, but for all intensive purposes it's just fine. Especially when I'm driving a house party or anything else that just serves as background music. If I'm going to listen to music, and JUST listen to music (i.e. Beethoven or Mozart) then I'll use the real CD. Otherwise MP3s work just fine with my HiFi system.

And any MP3s that I do get off the internet (I will make no pretense that I don't illegally copy music) I will always listen to them before putting them through the big system.

I dunno, I'm perfectly content with using MP3s just about everywhere.

Re:Waste of Money

[cloudmaster]

mp3s will still have hisses and skips that can be dangerous to powerful, quality audio setups

Have you ever actually heard an mp3? Mp3 compression decreases the available frequencies in a sound file, causing an audible reduction in sound quality through decreased *range*, making the recordings sound somewhat flat. Pops are caused by crap ripping software/cd-rom/cd's introducing noises into the original source, not by the encoder. I'm not sure what would cause an mp3 to hiss, aside from poorly-isolated playback equipment (again, not the fault of mp3).

That said, this thing is somewhat overpriced.

Re:Waste of Money

[John_Booty]

You: What else could this possibly add to any software mp3 player?

Taco: "It won't stick out visually. And there aren't whirring fans to add more noise to your listening environment... 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"

You:Do you _really_ think mp3s sound nearly as good as a good CD player?

Taco: 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.

I think your questions, for the most part, were answered already. You might want to check this link out before you ask any more. Moderators, too... I'm not sure why this comment was modded "+3, Insightful".

Re:Waste of Money

[AtaruMoroboshi]

I actually rip some stuff to 320 kbs to listen to it without the sound of the cd player playing.

Try listening to Bernhard Gunter - "polychrome w/neon nails" in a regular cd player, and you'll hear the cd spinning as much as his ultra quiet microsound clickyness and high pitches.

I'd rip it just straight to audio (in fact in mac os X you can just drag files RIGHT off the cd and it saves as an AIFF) but I don't have that kind of disc space laying around at the momment.

Re:Waste of Money

[Mr. Eradicator]

Actually Winamp (and probably every other media player) can do this. It's called file sharing.

Re:Waste of Money

[belroth]

Not to mention that some of us still have extensive collections of, and listen to, vinyl.
I realise this probably says a lot about my age but I still prefer sounds generated by dragging a scrap of diamond along a spiral groove....

I'm not mad, LP still sounds better to me on my hi-fi than the alternatives. Having said that while I prefer to listen to vinyl, CD is more convenient and I'm in the process of backing up my vinyl to CD, and then the CD to mp3. I may miss the CD stage out eventually if I can figure out how to merge a RioVolt (nice kit) and a CD autochanger - the ability to have 6 mp3 CDs in the car is attractive.....

Re:Waste of Money

[kaimiike1970]

From reading his post, I actually think he unintentionally used a more accurate phrase...

=) He was talking about some fairly intensive purposes.

Re:Waste of Money

[drinkypoo]

Skipping isn't much of a problem on the large, heavy, non-portable CD players hat stereos usually use.

Actually, non-portable CD players are very rarely heavy. My first CD player was a single-disc pioneer with very little functionality; 14 track program, shuffle, track back and forth, scan back and forth, a crappy display, and a fairly small case. I paid $90 for it used, and it worked okay until I gave it away. The heaviest part of it was the metal chassis.

That was a fairly early model; Newer machines have more features, but that's all in code, and better displays, which really don't add any weight worth mentioning, and so on. But when you have a big scratch in a CD, it still skips pretty reliably on almost any system.

And finally, if your stereo system is damaged by a skipping CD, then some part of your stereo system is substandard, or you're turning it up too loud, at least for your equipment, which brings us back to the substandard thing. Why on earth would you buy stereo equipment which can be damaged by skipping or hiss, anyway? So your sphincter can clench every time the music blips? No thanks, I like my stereo equipment to last, and my sphincters to operate without unnecessary action.

Re:Waste of Money

[Icy]

Ummmm, you are missing the point here. Its not a remote control. It only gets the mp3s off Windows network shares (Samba even). It does not require you to run stereo jacks into the other room, jut ethernet. You can have dozens of computers sharing mp3s. The quality is great on powerfull systems, my fraternity used laptops to DJ our parties every weekend. We just hooked the laptops to the mixer. We had a big EV rack mounted amp, and two floor standing speakers with 2 15"s in each. The sound quality was fine (just ask the neighbors and the police :))

-Matt

Re:Waste of Money

[rho]

See, if all you chuckleheads had spent gobs of time and money on bassing out your car as a teenager, you could be deaf like me and think a 96kbps MP3 sounds just fine.

It's a superior cultural advantage, because I can fit more stolen music on smaller hard drives than the rest of you.

Re:Waste of Money

[Lumpy]

Nope, you should really read before you post.
It is the best stand-alone mp3 player available period.

The Panja box is crap compared to it. and everything else has really poor audio quality.

It is Awesome, and I am going to buy 2 more. (luckily I got my first 2 from Best Buy when they were stupid and clearanced them at $139.99)

the only problem I have with the audiotron is the hardware needs a modification right away to keep the LCD from burning out. Adding a variable resistor on the contrast allows you to quit over-driving it and burning out the LCD like 1 out of 5 units suffer from. (I was lucky and got 2 in a row that burned out in 3 hours!!)

Turtle beach could make it awesome, but the seem to be dropping it due to lack of interest and the fact the the RIAA wants to make their products illegal.

Re:Waste of Money

[unitron]

While a frat party might be an excellent place to test the maximum capacity for amplitude of a sound system, I'm not so sure it's the ideal environment for assessing other qualities such as fidelity in reproduction of the input.

What I'd like...

[dafoomie]

I want an mp3 player that I can cheaply attach an ide hard drive to, I don't care if I have to tape it on there. I don't mind walking around with a hard drive. I'd rather do that than only have what, 16-60 megs of storage? Not nearly enough... Just a normal run of the mill mp3 player with an ide interface stuck somewhere on there would be great.

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.

Re:What I'd like...

[dafoomie]

I know theres combos but those are expensive... I just want one that I can stick my own hard drive on. An ide interface next to the headphone jack cant be that expensive.

Re:What I'd like...

[Reid]

I just bought the Archos Jukebox with the 20 GB hard drive for about $330, and it's nice. The worst thing about it is the volume control being menu driven and not a physical dial. The included headphones have a built-in volume dial, so if you use them, you're okay. Plus, the display is pretty small and the controls are a little awkward. But nothing like loading up your entire MP3 collection and taking it with you! Now I just need to figure out how to hook it up to the car stereo....

For a good comparison of large capacity players, check out this site.

Why bother?

[Urd]

I don't even live in the US. I'd rather continue my work on making a really slim PC running Linux to do it. That way it can double as a family email reading station at the same time for little extra effort. The price tag is interresting tho...

My .02 Euro,
Urd.

Worthless...

[malfunct]

If I want an MP3 component for my stereo I want one that can at least read music from a CD. It would be nice if it could also pick up music over the network, but basically I don't want my computer to be forced to run, and if it is, it might as well play the music itself. I don't know about the quality of audio components in the audiotron (they did a good job of avoiding that aspect in the review) but my SB Live is pretty decent unless the cables linking the computer to the stereo are too long.

Re:Worthless...

[mini me]

I don't want my computer to be forced to run

No one is forcing you. You could pick up a NAS to do the job just as well. You can also free up some hard drive space on your computer while you're at it. A CD player would be a nice bonus, but you could always share out your CDROM on your computer. But who wants to burn MP3's to CD anyway when they have massive amounts of hard drive space at your disposal? CD's are an awful media for audio when you compare it to a network. Being able to grab an audio stream off the net would be another nice feature to add to these boxes.

These devices solve some of the problems with using sound cards hooked up to amps. ground loops, interference, etc. (yes I know digital output will fix those problems, but not everyone has a stereo with digital inputs.) They also act like a stereo component and not a computer which many consumers will think is an asset.

Re:Worthless...

[Lispy]

You're right. All the time reading the review i was thinking, hell why doesn't he just fire up xmms and play the songs. Sure, the network thingy is a neat feature more mp3 players should have but really, what's the use?? Maybe handing the device to some of our office-network-users that yet couldn't figure how to access our mp3 server, err meant fileserver...i'd say it would be a great thing if you have a wireless lan and if it would be ten times smaller AND if you have a really huge home for walking around and listening to it on the headphones an...no wait, that's just as dumb...

Re:Worthless...

[malfunct]

I'm just saying that without its own storage, and only being able to read from the network, it really seems like a nearly useless object. Its worthless without a computer which already does a good enough job of decoding MP3's in the first place so why have it?

Better: buy the Apex player at Wal-Mart for $100

[emil]

It handles CDDA, DVD, VCD, and MP3 discs.

No, it doesn't run TCP/IP, but it seems like much less hassle to me.

I can't see

[trilucid]

paying over $200 for *anything* like this. What's so bad about using and old P90 box and your existing home audio system (most of us have one) for this sort of thing?

It puts old hardware to a good use, and if you invest in a couple of used 20GB drives, you can store all the MP3s you want *cheap*.

It's a nifty device, no doubt. However, I'm not lacing up my running shoes on this one just yet...

Anybody know what the real advantage of this thing is? Am I just missing something horribly obvious? To be fair, I suppose the best place to advertise something sold on ThinkGeek is /. after all ;-), but I hardly thing this was worth a review of its own...

Re:I can't see

[Jeffrey Baker]

The problem with a P90 and a few hard disks is that you can hear all those fans and platter spinning around. Kinda spoils the listening experience, I think. Well, MP3 ruins the listening experience so maybe it's a wash.

A P90 barely has enough power to decode MP3 anyway.

Re:I can't see

[dattaway]

But this is an ethernet appliance. Its the future. Listen to the music. Pretty soon, the lights in your room will have an ethernet jack as everything else. Imagine downloading some coordinated mood lighting from your server after dinner.

The stove, refrigerator, even the kitchen sink, er dishwasher... Everything will have an IP address. Your dinner will be cooked to exacting specifications and the groceries will be automatically ordered.

Re:I can't see

[freebeer]

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.

Re:I can't see

[bricriu]

The real advantage of this is that it blends in. Sure, using an old box is fine, from a purely technical p.o.v., but it's not aesthetically pleasing. Plus, I'm definitely not qualified to set up a remote control for a random linux box. I won't be lining up for one either, but that's only because I have a machine in my living room. My parents, on the other hand, have about 5 computers in their house, on 3 different floors, and already have an excellent stereo system (CD, Phono, tape, radio) in their living room with speakers ranging all around the 1st floor -- this would be a perfect Xmas gift for them, allowing them to utilize existing structure in a very pretty way.

Re:I can't see

[jerrytcow]

The stove, refrigerator, even the kitchen sink, er dishwasher... Everything will have an IP address. Your dinner will be cooked to exacting specifications and the groceries will be automatically ordered

Hopefully the script kiddie who roots my box will be able to cook better than me. Maybe he'll be kind enough to start the dishwasher after dinner too.

Re:I can't see

[vanguard]

I can't agree with you. I have a nice stereo in my living room sitting in my entertainment center. Putting an older P90 in there just isn't an option. This is perfect for me except I wish it had it's own storage. All I have is laptops in my house so I don't have a nice always on server to keep my files on. This is close, I just need an option that holds a hard drive.

Re:I can't see

[brer_rabbit]

And the alternate problem of hooking a laptop up to the home stereo is that most laptops have absolutely *crappy* soundcards. Anyone know a *good* PCMCIA soundcard? It's either that or buy one of these things.

Re:I can't see

[dublin]

Oh, yeah, it's definitely worth it to avoid spending that extra $100. After all, the dozens of hours of your time you'll spend rolling your own and fiddling with the setup isn't worth anything. I'm also sure you don't mind a big, noisy, butt-ugly PC as an audio component, and of course, you won't mind paying for all that power the thing sucks down while just sitting there waiting for you to decide what to play. (Or maybe you just won't mind waiting a couple of minutes for your MP3 player to boot before you can listen to anything...) REally, using a PC for this sort of thing is just plain dumb - if ever a net function *needed* to be embedded in an appliance, this is it.

Seriously, anyone griping about the Audiotron because of its *price* has got rocks in their head - it's a fair deal for what it does. I'd have designed it differently (and better), but it's by far the best network MP3 player out there now. (Have a look at the Diamond Rio/Dell equivalent for a lesson in how NOT to build such a device - thiers requires Windows and specially modified MusicMatch software, which I'm *sure* they'll still be happy to support in five years, right?)

The Audiotron has some minor flaws, but it's by FAR the best implementation out there of a real network audio component, and the price isn't too bad, although I'd prefer a cheaper version with no local or even web "UI" per se, just some way to pass it the next song or playlist to run with. That way, I could code the UI however I like in any old web server...

Re:I can't see

[Cuthalion]

This goes for a couple of people, who are all "what's the point?"

Computers are noisy. There are all kinds of situations where you don't want to listen to the fan while you listen to the music. I guess you could use a laptop or G4 cube, but then you're well over $300.

This may come as a shock, but many people don't have their computer in the SAME ROOM as their primary stereo system. Or, even if they do, they have an auxilliary stereo elsewhere too (say, the bedroom). Get a P90 instead of this? I don't want to put a computer in my bedroom and one in my living room, that's what my office and server closets are for.

Like many products this is clearly not worth its expense for many people. But it sounds like this is something which could be quite useful to some.

Re:I can't see

[trilucid]

Hmm.... sounds like a call to start YAHBP (Yet Another Home-Brew Project) :-). I've gotta admit that a plain-jane PC case sitting next to one's stereo equipment isn't terribly pretty...

All righty, so how about marketing a cheap, attractive enclosure for PC cases of various sizes, with appropriate holes for cabling to pop out of? Something akin to custom PC cases, except it would only serve as a shell.

Also, to those who need their parents/roommates/kids to be able to use it, why not just use XMMS in "big" mode on a used 15" monitor? Not expensive at all (I've got ahold of some old ones for less than $25 in the past), and does the trick nicely.

Anybody wanna register "pcaudioshell.com"? ;-)

Re:I can't see

[wik]

Surely you could setup a cron job to do that. Or a fancy makefile:

$ make dinner

wget -m http://www.tvdinner.com

mv packaged/stuff/1.box /dev/microwave

setenv TABLE

sleep 1000

clear

rm -rf packaged/stuff

make clean

This isn't too far-fetched. Four years ago I had my coffee machine wired up to a webserver.

Re:I can't see

[Jeffrey Baker]

Yes I read the article. The post I'm replying asked what the advantage was over a p90 with a hard disk and sound card. The advantage is no fans. With this device and a network connection, your fans and hard disks can be in another room, building, or nation.

Re:I can't see

[Neon Spiral Injector]

You can use the USB port and get a USB to TOS-link converter for pure digital out of your laptop.

But this is off topic.

Re:I can't see

[shepd]

>A P90 barely has enough power to decode MP3 anyway.

It has plenty enough power. I had mpg123 playing 256 kbits MP3s on a P60 with only EISA slots, over NFS on an ISA soundcard and 3com Etherlink III card! Not a single skip, unless I started doing anything else on the machine. (The machine was an original Compaq Prosignia or something like that).

>you can hear all those fans and platter spinning around

Rip out the HDDs, boot of the network. Rip the fan off the CPU, and use a bigger heatsink (this is fine for virtually all the original pentium series. You can easily build a power supply without fans. Problems solved :-)

Don't forget to put the server in another room/closet.

>Well, MP3 ruins the listening experience so maybe it's a wash

Check out www.r3mix.net if you are having trouble with MP3 quality. You simply aren't encoding at a good enough bitrate. If you can tell 256 kbps MP3 from the original then you must be a bat.

Re:I can't see

[Jeffrey Baker]

If you can't tell the difference between MP3 and CD you must be a stump.

Re:I can't see

[Jeffrey Baker]

Great, now you have a netbooting PC that gets music from the network and has no fans. Hrmm, that sounds a lot like the Audiotron unit mentioned in this article.

Execept, I almost gaurantee that a p90, mainboard, 8MB RAM, network card, ir port, remote control, and soundcard with digital output is going to set you back at least the same amount of money, more even when you factor in the time you spent dicking with it.

Re:I can't see

[loosenut]

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.

Re:I can't see

[Auckerman]

"But this is an ethernet appliance. Its the future. Listen to the music. Pretty soon, the lights in your room will have an ethernet jack as everything else. Imagine downloading some coordinated mood lighting from your server after dinner."

The stove, refrigerator, even the kitchen sink, er dishwasher... Everything will have an IP address. Your dinner will be cooked to exacting specifications and the groceries will be automatically ordered.

This beleif caused the dotcom bubble. It has already been proven wrong (by the bursting of the bubble). People ENJOY shopping. The smell of an open market (flea markets), the sound of people, the touch of new fabric, and many other things can NEVER be replaced by technology.

I sure do hope you were trying to be funny...

Re:I can't see

[shepd]

>If you can't tell the difference between MP3 and CD you must be a stump.

Sure I can tell the difference. One format is smaller and includes error checking. The other does not.

Re:I can't see

[pr0nbot]

Pretty soon, the lights in your room will have an ethernet jack

Time to crack out the port scanner...

Re:I can't see

[ryanwright]

Execept, I almost gaurantee that a p90, mainboard, 8MB RAM, network card, ir port, remote control, and soundcard with digital output is going to set you back at least the same amount of money

I think you're missing the point. Most of us have old computers laying around. I have no less than 2 dozen old P166's stacked up in a closet. 32MB with >2 gig hard drives, PCI network cards, some have CD-ROMs... In this case, it's only a matter of spending a little time. Heck, even if you have to build something from scratch, you can pickup old Pentiums with most everything you need already inside for under $100 just about anywhere.

Re:I can't see

[Spriggig]

and my wife has to be able to use it.

Very good point, ease of use is a strong selling point.

Re:I can't see

[shepd]

The prices I quote are $CAN.

>p90, mainboard, 8MB RAM

$40-$50. I'm sure you can do better. :-)

>network card

Etherlink III costs about $5.

>ir port

Build it yourself. Resistors, $1. LDR, $5. DB-9 to RJ-13, $2. Cable, $2. Total for the port: $10.

>soundcard with digital output

Un-necessary, but a SB-Live value is $70. I would use a Yamaha without digital out though, since it isn't necessary. $40.

Total cost: $45 + $5 + $10 + $70 = $130 CAN.

Totalling (drum roll): $83 US.

It took me about 2 hours to set up the P60. Probably would take a little longer to build the IR port (a hour -- there's good advice on the web if you spend 5 minutes searching). Add another 2 hours to get the software working (probably too much).

That's 3 hours of your time. Unless you are being paid $40 an hour, well, guess what, you are saving money. That plus you get to enjoy a home built, ogg supporting, fun, extensible, and ultimately cool system.

I know which way I'd go.

Re:I can't see

[tonywong]

I can't wait for the IP toilet to come out. That way I check if I flushed that sucker in the morning after I get to work. The side benefit is a free pee-cam in case I need to get into pr0n.

Re:I can't see

[mi]

Rip out the HDDs, boot of the network. Rip the fan off the CPU, and use a bigger heatsink (this is fine for virtually all the original pentium series. You can easily build a power supply without fans. Problems solved :-)

That's just what the people, who brought you the player in subject did for you. And you can buy the results of their labor for $300. Even if all the parts were free for you, I don't see how you can manage to do this yourself in less than a day. Even if the result is just as good as their unit, your time must be worth more than $300/8hours = $37.50/hour. In the US that is...

Re:I can't see

[davewill]

>>That's 3 hours of your time.

BwaaaHaHaHaHa!!! You'll spend several evenings/weekends debugging, playing with UI, having the UI run dog slow, reprogramming the ir as you look for a good remote. It may be fun, if so go for it, but it will NOT take 3 hours.

Re:I can't see

[shepd]

>BwaaaHaHaHaHa!!! You'll spend several evenings/weekends debugging, playing with UI, having the UI run dog slow, reprogramming the ir as you look for a good remote. It may be fun, if so go for it, but it will NOT take 3 hours.

That's too bad it took you that long. I know it takes under an hour because, while I didn't do it personally, I did watch someone else use a prebuilt IR unit out of the box in about 5 minutes. Looking at the complexity of the project, I know I could build it in under 30 minutes. I was overestimating, infact.

Re:I can't see

[eschatfische]

Even at $300, the AudioTron's well worth it. Sure, it's more expensive than a P90, but it's far more convenient.

Reason #1: Remote Control. It's got a great remote. That remote for your P90 won't be cheap, and it won't be designed specifically for this purpose. You can use the AudioTron's remote from across the room to perform complex functions without looking at the display. Can it be done with a PC? Sure, you can do something similar. But it'd be more time and effort than it's worth.

Reason #2: It costs less than the average PC. Go to ComputerGeeks and buy something that'll play MP3s nice refurb w/keyboard, mouse and monitor. How much will that cost after shipping and possibly a cheap desk to put it on? Around the same as an AudioTron.

Reason #3: It's not a computer. Believe it or not, some of us don't want a power-sucking PC and monitor in every room in our home. The AudioTron's small, doesn't consume much power, and is highly inconspicuous. For many geeks, style isn't an issue -- but for those of us who are, and like an uncluttered environment, the AT is great.

Obviously, if you already have a PC in every room in your place, the AT isn't nearly as useful. This seems to be especially valuable for people with wives or husbands who have protested about having a PC in each room.

Reason #4: Backlit display you can see clearly across the room. Visibility, IMHO, is YMMV -- I find the display very easy to read, others find it very difficult. Still, this is a selling point for me.

Again, yeah, if you have a PC in every room already, the AT doesn't make much sense. If you don't, and you want to take your MP3 collection into a room without buying and setting up a computer in that room, the AT's the way to go.

Eschatfische.

Re:I can't see

[hairy moose]

Obligatory caveat: I happen to own an Audiotron, and am extremely pleased with it.

Think of the audiotron as a friendly front end to the P90 with multiple drives (multiple 80G, not 20G... depends on the collection, I guess)

From my point of view, there are three basic advantages:

1) it looks and feels like a stereo component. This implies, among other things, high SoAF (Significant other Acceptance Factor). In our house, it also means we listen to more of our collection, and look for more interesting material, than we used to either working with just CDs or when I had the old P90 hooked directly to the stereo

2) it uses my already ripped collection off the house server (the house server is what happened to the old P90 that used to be hooked directly to the stereo). So, in my case, incorporating it into the other systems in the house was easy. We had ripped the CD collection for eas of portability (easier to carry bits already on the laptop than add a CD player, easier to transport bits from point A to point B on an already existing network...)

3) this device (as opposed to other similar devices) supports a decent sound quality due to its support of S/PDIF out and lack of fan. (admittedly, you have to have additional supporting gear, like a digital ready receiver or an outboard DAC to take advantage of this, not an issue in my case) Yes, you can duplicate this with a decent (non-SB) sound card (e.g. M-Audio Audiophile 2496), but you've ended up spending the same $ anyway. (plus, you've still got to contend with monitor, fan, etc., near your stereo & analog electronics)

(standard caveats: I own one, I don't have any affiliation with the companies, I do own CD copies of the 15,000+ songs, IANAL, IAAM, YMMV, )

Re:I can't see

[CaseyB]

And the script kiddies?

#vi dinner

mv packaged/stuff/*.box /dev/gasoven
ovencontrol /dev/gasoven -temperature 'broil'
sleep 100000

:wq!

#exit

Re:I can't see

[zentigger]

All I have is laptops in my house so I don't have a nice always on server to keep my files on...
Just hook up an old P90 as a file server...

Re:I can't see

[ncc74656]

That's just what the people, who brought you the player in subject did for you. And you can buy the results of their labor for $300. Even if all the parts were free for you, I don't see how you can manage to do this yourself in less than a day. Even if the result is just as good as their unit, your time must be worth more than $300/8hours = $37.50/hour. In the US that is...

Not everybody attempts to put a dollar value on every single minute of time...especially not on stuff that's for fun. Someone who does that doesn't have his priorities straight, IMNSHO. If you enjoy doing something (whatever it is), why would your time matter to the extent that you would be compelled to attach a monetary value to it?

Re:I can't see

[crazyj]

I hope to hell that my lights and everything else have an 802.11* connection and not ethernet requiring a cable.

* I'd include an "or BlueTooth" but I don't see BlueTooth ever becoming popular.

Re:I can't see

[vanguard]

I don't enjoy shopping, at least not for most things (I like shopping for my salt water fish tank). I still buy things online and I would never go to a flea market. My dog food is delivered to my door because it's too heavy for my wife to buy in bulk.

IMHO, it's not a fad, it's just not for everybody.

Re:I can't see

[Sentry21]

I can pick up a P133 ith 64 megs of ram, 3 gig hard drive, sound card, network, video, etc. for $120-150 Canadian, which is quite a bit less than the $200 US (about $300 Canadian) for the Audiotron. I can certainly put in a decent sound card and IR port for less than $150.

While the Audiotron is quite probably a more elegant solution in a lot of ways, the idea of stringing network cables, setting up smb shares (I would want a dedicated NT server for this if I got it anyway), and waiting for it to scan the whole network seems to suck quite a bit. I'll just spend that $200 on getting a better DVD player, and burn MP3 CDs instead, thanks.

--Dan

Re:I can't see

[_Sprocket_]

Hopefully the script kiddie who roots my box will be able to cook better than me.

They'll h4x0r your toaster with a Denial of Toast attack.

Hard-driveless is better

[Computer!]

Notice the low price once hard disk or other media is removed from the picture? Some flash RAM would be nice to save settings, though.

How long until the manufacturer is required to put DRM in at the hardware level, since "LAN" storage could be internet storage over broadband. What's to keep several users from forming a community of these devices? How great would the ability to listen to any song by any artist on demand for free? I didn't see any search functionality, though, so thousands of mp3s might get a little unwieldy.

Re:Hard-driveless is better

[LoudMusic]

I hadn't really thought about going outside of my local network before ... but that is a great idea! I'm on a city-wide fast (4mbit) cable modem connection with lots of friends. This would make listening to their music really easy. It seems like it would work great in dorm buildings too.

Being able to access multiple mp3 collections on a LAN is the best feature about the AudioTron. I don't think most of these people see that. It's also a high quality device.

The beta software that CT talks about sounds good. It will need a nice web interface for the geeks. It will also need OGG support, though.

~LoudMusic

Audiotron

[Beatlebum]

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.

Re:Audiotron

[simpl3x]

i have been looking for something like this so that i can use my older Cobalt NasRaq with 60gigs of raid for a home m3 server. it connects via the network and i can back up the music to dlt. very cool, but this is not a regular mp3 player. i use a laptop not a desktop, and don't want a pc in my living room. it would be very cool if this functioned like a server so that an mp3 player on my laptop could access the music over the web. hey, while were at it, i would like it to have an internet radio station on apache... yum!

Re:Shameless Marketing

[ttyRazor]

A friend of mine has one of these, and it pretty much works as Taco described. So, yeah, it might be a bit "convenient" that thinkgeek just so happens to sell them, but at least he's not exaggerating.

Hackable?

[barnaclebarnes]

Has anyone hacked this yet? It would be great to see the upgrades come from the user community who know what they want and add interfaces to my music collection which I already have stored under the rimps system.

Also WLAN would definately be a plus. I don't have the ability to run CAT5 through my apartment...

/b

Re:Hackable?

[Rude Turnip]

Do what I do and let it sprawl from the server closet all over the floor of the apartment, running free and wild...just as God intended.

Re:Hackable?

[kaimiike1970]

I too have 'free-range' cat5 in my house. One day it will all be in the walls and we can sit back and be nostalgic about how 'cool' and 'hardcore' we were...

yeah and so?

[bliss]

"thinkgeek."

so? is there a problem

"who im still mad about for incuring me customs charges"

If you live out of the country in which the object is located expect this.

" and threatening to throw my credit rating off."

I would like to know how this happened

"this is a shameless plug. pathetic i say pathetic."

they are affiliated with a company which is ideologically similar with the people who purtchess things there are essentially have other things of similar interest.

"i guess its products for nerds capitalism that matters eh taco?"

I may have to say this but you really don't have to buy it. It isn't being forced on you.

other formats, CDs?

[mi]

I wish it could also play

• other formats -- easy through software upgrade
• regular CDs and other sources (DVD, mini-disks) -- "ripped" on the fly by your computer in another room

BTW, do we know, what's the OS inside it? Can run SETI, I'm sure -- while nobody is listening...

wOOt !

[ReidMaynard]

no wireless?

barbarians !

My Favorite MP3 player

[El_Smack]

Is the RIO Volt. It is about $140 US, plays regular audio CD's and any MP3's I have downloaded incuding VBR ecoded files, has had no problems with CD-R or CD-RW, gets about 13 hours of play from 2 AA batteries, and best of all, is firmware upgradeable.
And RIO is releasing firmmware in response to requests from users, like a more variable volume and a user defined equalizer setting. So for realtivly cheap, I can have 650M of music with me, and more if I take a couple cd's with me.

Re:My Favorite MP3 player

[SomeOtherGuy]

Yea, I have tried just about every solution and the RioVolt is more or less the best alternative yet. ** This is based on the criteria of space, portability, battery life, file formats (mp3,wma,etc..), etc...etc...

Re:My Favorite MP3 player

[sulli]

best of all, is firmware upgradeable.

Watch out! Someday RIAA may get them to put some sort of DRM crapola in there. Make sure to keep backups of your firmware "upgrades"

Apex is OK

[swb]

I have the three-CD Apex unit and it does a good job of playing MP3s, with the following gripes:

• 8.3 on-screen naming only, which makes the whole navigation/menu nearly useless and kind of fubars track ordering.
• No shuffle mode.
• No programmability (eg, play this directory only, etc)
• Mine seems prone to skipping the first second or so of songs once a while. Sometimes hitting the back button and starting over plays it, sometimes it doesn't.

I'm mostly happy with it, when we have parties or other gatherings its nice to make a master mix CD that involves no changing of CDs, although setting the playlist order would be a welcome addition.

Re:Apex is OK

[JabberWokky]

No shuffle mode.

If it's like the 600A (the single disk model), the shuffle works (it's accessed via the button on the remote labeled... "shuffle"!), *but* it's touchy. I thought it didn't work for awhile until I figured out that it only works in certain circumstances. Since I use XMMS controlled via X10 for my MP3 player, I haven't played with the Apex in awhile, and can't remember exactly what the conditions are, but I seem to recall that it's: shuffle does not work when playing a song, you must hit shuffle after you load the disk, but before you hit play.

Agreed about playlists, BTW - I have a couple of CDs that are burned with "playlists", i.e., just the songs that I want to play together, though, which works well when CDRs are dirt cheap. --
Evan

Hopefully this is mostly on topic

[vanguard]

I really want one of these and Christmas is coming. However, since going wireles all I have are notebooks with 802.11b around the house. In a perfect world I would also get a little network storage device that I can use to hold my pictures, music, etc.

Has anybody seen anything like this for under $500?

Re:Hopefully this is mostly on topic

[Mondrames]

Did you try Quantum Snap Servers?[quantum.com] Disk I/O can be a little slow on the lower end ones, but I've been happy with mine.

Re:Hopefully this is mostly on topic

[shepd]

>Has anybody seen anything like this for under $500?

Since its a notebook network, why not get a used P100 notebook with 2 PCMCIA slots? Put in a soundcard, and put in an 802.11b card. Load on some MP3 software and you're golden!

Problem solved for less than buying a bridge...

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:MP3 Players

[yellowstone]

The TDK mojo had pretty much all the features except for buggy firmware

Wow! Usually, the buggy firmware is available with the first release! ;-)

Re:MP3 Players

[ny_p]

Having been through this same process..i must say that i agree..the one advantage that i see missing is that it gives you mobility and 700Mb a pop isnt bad..most important the Volt has decent output quality..if its hooked up to a powered subwoofer the sound levels are acceptable enough for me.

The only downsides as you mention are not being able to jog with it but since i dont do that much this isnt a problem. Since its powered either by AC at home or with an adapter in the car again the battery issue isnt a problem either

I use it in the car with an adapter and it works great. My home system consists of a 20Gb server on an old P90 that is samba mounted..

My next project would be to get this hooked up to a DSL line with accompanying web interface and streaming capability so that i can access it from anywhere..

Re:Better: buy the Apex player at Wal-Mart for $10

[b0bby]

I'm happy with mine. And at 128 I can't honestly tell the difference between the MP3 & the source cd in my jukebox, and this despite the fact that the audio is going from the player to the tv & back to the amp. Of course, my system is not in an optimal configuration right now, and I have a tin ear...

seems like an old computer is superior

[dpease]

I've got an old P133 tower sitting in my living room that seems to do everything this gadget does and then some. It's got a local disk so it holds about 7 GB of music locally, and it's connected to my network so it can grab more music anytime I want it to. It's got an irman installed so it uses my stereo's remote control.

There are two nice things about this setup IMO.

1. You don't need any special dedicated software. Anything you can do with a real PC, you can do with the PC without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor you have sitting next to your stereo. Just use winvnc or a similar program to log in from your real computer. No waiting for patches for the special-purpose software that the company provides.
   
2. It's really, really cheap. You can get an old computer for way less than $300... doubt mine's worth half that. It's slow as hell, but the processor almost never pins on playback and it's reliable--weeks of uptime, even with Win98. Tack on an irman and you're ready to roll.
   
   Anyway, as far as I can tell this looks like a problem that didn't need solving in the first place. Maybe if the appliance were cheaper than a computer that would really work just as well, they'd have something.
   

Re:seems like an old computer is superior

[CoolCash]

Lets see... A noisy "cheap" looking computer sitting next to my expensive home stereo. I have one of these and it is great, yes it does have some issues. But the positives outweigh the negatives. This is the only solution out there like this and it is ahead of its time. It also supports wav and wma formats.

Re:seems like an old computer is superior

[CapnGib]

...old P133 tower sitting in my living room ...

Um... I think that's the whole point. Most people (even computer geeks) don't want bulky old computers all over their home with fans buzzing and hard disks whining.

Re:seems like an old computer is superior

[dpease]

Well, I've got mine in a corner behind my couch and the cabinet with my stereo on top of it, so it's fairly invisible, and the noise is also effectively baffled. I understand not everyone has a convenient place to put a computer, but it's kind of a knee-jerk response to say "hey, it'll be ugly" when a mini tower takes up so little space.

no ogg support?

[abde]

how can you endorse something that doesn't support OGG? will upgrades for ogg support be available? can it be hacked?

Re:no ogg support?

[SomeOtherGuy]

What consumer audio device does support OGG?? If the only way to endorse OGG is to not get anything -- then sorry. Consumer audio devices that play and record/encode music are pretty much commonplace now days, and it is pretty easy to see what formats are dominating....But then again you could always choose not to watch movies because they don't play in your Beta machine.

Re:no ogg support?

[LoudMusic]

I totally agree with you. It seems like a lot of /.ers forget that there are other people in the world. If it isn't the underdog then they don't want it. Come on! They wouldn't buy it anyway, they're too bent on open source and free software that they won't shell out some cash for a decent product.

These things are designed for -consumers- ... if they want a piece of -geek- hardware, they better build it themselves, that's the only way they'll ever be happy. And after all, thats the way of the geeks.

~LoudMusic

Re:no ogg support?

[ttyRazor]

Since ogg still isn't officially finalized yet, I doubt they want to go through the effort of implementing something that could change any moment.

Re:no ogg support?

[Ob the Rat]

I've had one of these for about a year now. I asked about OGG on the mailing list (by the way, Turtle Beach has been extremely responsive to user requests via the mailing list) and was told that the last time they checked the OGG format hadn't been finalized (it has now), and lossless formats seem to be more important to the majority of their users in any case.

Talking to the user rep that monitors the list, it sounds possible that they'll add OGG eventually. (at the very least, it isn't technically impossible for them to do so).

The only possible problem that I can see is that OGG decoding seems (in my experience anyway) to require more processing power than MP3 decoding. It could be that the machine isn't up to the challenge.

Oh no not a web interface

[blonde rser]

Last time I set up my computer with a web interface to play mp3s (nothing fancy just a couple of cgi scripts) I got songs playing in my room at all hours of the early early morning - due to some of the guys that knew about the system.

I know there were ways I could have locked down the system but just all too lazy. Have to admit it was cool being able to use my wap enabled cel phone as a remote control.

I want my Ogg Vorbis

[Eric Seppanen]

I'll seriously consider one of these once I see one that supports Vorbis. Tying ourselves to patented standards is going to hurt us in the long run. What if the folks who own patents on MP3 start requiring secret copy-protection measures in their patent licenses?

Additionally, I'm not going to spend a cent unless I have assurances that the company is committed to fighting off the music industry's attempts to control digital music formats. I'm afraid that firmware updates down the road will start removing open-format functionality, and start trying to force me to use rights-eroding proprietary formats.

Re:I want my Ogg Vorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I want my Ogg Vorbis

[Eric Seppanen]

You make valid points, except who cares if they release future firmware updates that start restricting usage?

Well, you're right in that I wouldn't be prevented from using the product I'd purchased. But I think altering products via firmware updates is sleazy, and I don't want to support companies that would pull such a bait and switch. Furthermore, I may want to buy a second box for the basement, or one for my parents. For all these reasons I would prefer to buy a product whose manufacturer isn't going to try to screw me over to appease the recording industry.

Re:I want my Ogg Vorbis

[thenatex]

Easy Solution: Don't Upgrade!

Re:I want my Ogg Vorbis

[Eric Seppanen]

Huh. 3 people moderated that as a troll. An expressed desire for free software to spread and overtake it's patent-encumbered rival. That's pretty disappointing; I thought more folks here cared about stuff like that.

Sounds Cool to me!

[Comen]

The price sounds alittle high, for what we all know is in that box, but i probally couldnt make on of these things and make it look good in my stereo rack, wich BTW is important to me.
I have a problem in my house this thing would be great for.
Right now I run a fiber optic cable from my SB live card from my PC through the wall to me main stereo unit.
This works great but I have to get up and go in the other room to load new music, its a pain in the ass, It would be nice to be able to see the names of the directories well enough from the LCD display to load a album from the couch. I have thought about vga to ntsc converter and a wireless mouse for that room, but those things dont look that good on a TV and are like 150$
Can someone comment on how good the LCD looks for browseing directories? i have all my MP3's in a main direcory with a directory for each artist, in each artist directory i have a directory for every album etc...
Another good thing I see about this is, that I could play songs from the LCD display while my PC is doing other things I dont want to interupt such as a video game or something. this device is more than a WINAMP remote controle since it sounds like all processing is done by this device and only data is transfered over the ethernet. where right now with a fiber optic cable the main pc holding the files processes them and plays them and only the audio itself is sent to the stereo.
This thing sounds great I might have to get one :)

pricewatch

[brer_rabbit]

you can save a couple bucks over thinkgeek at pricewatch. But then again it's only a couple bucks, and thinkgeek seems like a decent place to support.

More reviews of the Audio Tron

[vanguard]

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/review-audiotron.ht ml

http://www.homepna.com/HPNA-AudiotronReview.html

http://www.cnet.com/electronics/0-6342420-1305-470 4127.html

I read one that said it looked like there was spot inside for a hard drive. Perhaps a guess about their next system?

They need a 802.11b (or "a" I guess) option.

[IMZombie]

I stream pull down MP3's just fine on my laptop around the house using it's 802.11b connection. I could use a device like this if it had a 802.11b option. It'd be next to impossible to get ethernet to the back rooms of my house.

Cool Idea though.

Re:Shameless Marketing

[drsoran]

Well, at least they're not that much more expensive at Thinkgeek than you can find them by searching shopper.com or Pricewatch. $289.99 on Thinkgeek and about $280-$290 from reputable dealers on the shopper.com search. This is better than $25 bucks for a case of those lame "energy" drinks on Thinkgeek.

Big but...(or butt... ;-)

[Grab]

This sounds like there's some usability problems and limitations. First off, your house has to be networked - this does seriously reduce its saleability! :-) Secondly, if it can only be controlled effectively through the web interface then you need a computer next to you to select the track, regardless. And if you've got that, why have a separate piece of kit?

I have a better suggestion - and if there's anyone from those hifi companies reading, pick this up. If it needs a graphical menu to browse effectively, why not build one in? OK, most hi-fi stuff doesn't have room for one in the rack-mounting form factor. But suppose you have one mounted flat in a drawer-type thing - you press a button, the drawer ejects, and the screen pops up, kind of like how Psion organisers work. Then the gadget could genuinely be driven from the front panel.

Jitter in the sound while you're browsing web pages is unacceptable. A two-processor system should really be used for this, one dedicated to sound processing and one dedicated to network access. Two cheap processors should work out the same price as one complex one, and it'd give much better quality output. Alternatively, web page serving should be a background task which only happens in the spare cycles between updates of the sound processing.

As for showing up the limitations of MP3 - well, yeah. But then, did you buy all those 650 CDs that you've got the 6500 MP3s off? :-) The words "gift horse", "mouth", "don't look a" and "in the" are springing to mind in no particular order... ;-) Anyway, you can hear the limitation of MP3 through _headphones_ on a PC, never mind putting it through a fancy hifi system, so it obviously didn't bother you too much when you ripped them.

Graham.

Re:Big but...(or butt... ;-)

[GeorgeH]

First off, your house has to be networked - this does seriously reduce its saleability! :-)

It has HPNA networking built in, which uses regular home phone lines to network. Yeah, your computer needs a card that can speak HPNA, but that's better than requiring people to run Cat5 everywhere (not that I don't do that already).

Secondly, if it can only be controlled effectively through the web interface then you need a computer next to you to select the track, regardless. And if you've got that, why have a separate piece of kit?

There's a nice remote control pictured in the link at the top of the article.

Re:Big but...(or butt... ;-)

[unitron]

"First off, your house has to be networked - this does seriously reduce its saleability! :-)"

Why? Assuming that you did a professional job of it rather than just punching holes in the sheetrock and leaving cables hanging out. Isn't this like saying that wiring for telephones or cableTV reduces resale value?

Re:Big but...(or butt... ;-)

[Grab]

Oops - meant "this does reduce the saleability of the MP3 player", ie. you've limited your customer base to those with home networks installed, which is quite a small subset of available hi-fi and computer users.

Grab.

Re:Big but...(or butt... ;-)

[unitron]

Thanks for clearing that up, I was starting to wonder if I could increase resale value by giving the mildew and the termites free reign.

Re:SO MUCH MUSIC

[Colin]

If you have SO MUCH MUSIC that you need to rip to mp3s so that you can easily get to it all why not get a 100 (150 anyone?) CD changer?

I have a 200 CD player with my CD's in it. However, only one person can listen to it at a time - so I can't listen to one CD and womone else in the house listen to another from the same player. I'm looking for a good solution to that, and this might be it.

ESD Network Device or Streaming Subscriber

[siegesama]

While an MP3 box like this does sound cool (especially the lack of moving parts, I hate disk whirrs), it's MP3. And I don't use MP3 anymore, I use OGG. How long before someone hacks an ogg update together for it? How about different file-serving technologies (eg: mount NFS and scan those for audio files)?

What I'm waiting for ideally is something sorta like this, except from the different direction: I want to push music at it, rather than have it pull music from a defined source. I'd love an ESD device that'd sit on ethernet and wait for me to throw sounds at it. That way it'd be format inspecific: wanna play OGG, MP3, RealAudio, WAV? Go for it!

Or alternately, give it the ability to subscribe to a shoutcast stream. I don't know much about streaming music in this manner (I've never set it up or actually used it before; never needed to, really), but it sounds like I'd just have to tell the device to subscribe to any given stream (even one not local to my private network, provided it can access the outside net).

This device is pretty neat, but with a few modifications to make it more versatile, it'd be too damn cool for words.

Re:ESD Network Device or Streaming Subscriber

[cheesebot]

although it's not noted in the review, the beta firmware upgrades to the audiotron include streaming capabilities through the internet via "turtle-radio". you just set up an account with them where you list all the streaming URLs you want and the audiotron logs on and can play 'em all.

also consider SliMP3

[mihalis]

I just took delivery of a slimp3 from slimdevices.com. It's definitely worth a look. I'm still setting mine up, but here are the key points :

• Vacuum fluorescent display (nice : sharp, legible).
• Open Source streaming server written in perl runs on Windows, Linux, Mac.
• Small, low-power, low-noise device, so you can leave it always-on

I plan to put my own review up on my website. Mine is an early hand-soldered model, but they plan to move to mass-production which should bring the price down I would think.

Cheers,

Chris Morgan

Re:also consider SliMP3

[Richard5mith]

I also got a hold of one of the first 100 of these hand soldered models (number 43 if you're wondering) that was mentioned in a past Slashdot article.

- It's open source firmware and perl server mean you can hack the hell out of it yourself.
- Random, repeat, playlists, it's all here baby.
- Browser configuration and control like the audiotron, but it's instant, and doesn't make the player skip (it's really quite sad that the Audiotron does).
- Random, repeat, playlists, it's all here.
- Streaming of Internet radio stations.
- Future enhancements include alarm clock functions and I'm sure a hell of a lot more. The server can handle players throughout your house as well.

I can't fault it.

Use RF instead

[ksw2]

Just build an RF x-mitter, then you can listen to your t00nz in any room that has an FM stereo.

You buy this box, and you're limited to the stereo it's plugged into.

Re:SO MUCH MUSIC

[TheAwfulTruth]

Er, because maybe I have over 600 CDs? :)

Dell, Digital Audio Receiver

[kikensei]

I've got a Dell (which I believe is an OEM branded RIO) version of this. The drawback is that it can only talk to windows shares, and needs to have a server demon listening for the receiver on your windows storage machine. I've got a win2k box as my MP3 storage server. Wanted to ditch it for a while, as I use Suse linux for my desktops. The dell runs via TCP and its very nice to have all my music accessible at a few twists of the control knob. I use the Win2k PC to play DVD's, as I bought a Hollywood decoder card with digital audio out, it comes with a remote, so I could keep the win2k machine headless, park it next to my stereo/tv and play CD's MP3's and DVD's. Much as I'm drawn to move to a Samba supported solution, I think I'll hold off. I need a box that can play DVD's as well. If the Turtle beach unit had a DVD/CD player built in, I'd be first in line. And my win2k MP3 storage machine would be heading to a well deserved reformat in favor of linux.

Input Device

[sharkey]

And, on the plus side, the remote control/mouse has multiple buttons, so it meets Taco's Number 1 criterion.

no video out?

[TheGratefulNet]

they missed the boat, then.

with lcd monitors being small and cheaper each month, it would be great to be able to connect one to a box like this and VIEW more info about what I'm listening to. edit playlists, view album art, navigate with higher detail than a few lines of text could give you, etc.

we really do need a fanless/quiet playback and song selector system. no, a regular pc isn't quiet enough to put in a bedroom or listening room. I'm all for putting disks (the disk farm) in another room and the playback system in the main room, but this unit seems to fall a bit short for the price they're asking.

oh, and to not support wireless ethernet directly is a mistake. who wants to snake ethernet wires across your house when, today, you really don't have to. and no, I don't want to run an outboard access point - that only adds to the expense of the system.

Re:no video out?

[cr0sh]

I agree - there should be video out, if for nothing more than to bring up the playlist, etc on your TV (which will probably be near your stereo), as well as to add some visualization eye candy for the next party you throw...

Pentium 90MHz is fast enough

[raynet]

It really depends how the MP3-player is optimized. With a general player software P90 might be to slow but a player optimized for P90 is fast enough to play all normal bitrates. Even 80486 has enough power to play MP3 (if you allow some precision drop)

LIMP?

[fobbman]

I'm not up to speed on the plausibility of such a device, so I'll put it out to the /. brain trust.

Would it be possible to create a micro-Linux distribution that did nothing more than process .mp3 or .ogg streams for playing through your stereo similarly to this hardware product?

Technology is getting to the point that the old 486's laying around the house gathering dust are now being joined by old lower-end Pentium-class systems. Surely a Linux microkernel system compiled with your necessary soundcard and NIC drivers, along with the vorbis decoder would be small enough to fit on a floppy?

Maybe call it the LInux Music Project?

Re:LIMP?

[reverse flow reactor]

I have already put a bit of thought into that. We are already working on a version of XMMS that runs without graphics. So you end up with full support of all of your IO plugins (.ogg, .mp3, crossfader, shoutcast, viaVOICE? :), PALMamp, ID input, http controller..... ). Add in samba searches, icecast, a few scripts, som ecustom controllers, a large HD or CD drive, and a nice sound card, and mix well. I actually plan on setting it up for an in-car system, but it would work just as well for in-home.

need a $50 headless player

[dalesyk]

A small web configurable device with 3 jacks (5V in,rj-45,line out) would make for a nice whole house audio system. Place one in each room with powered speakers. For $50 a pop, I'd buy a few.

Neato

[sulli]

That seems like a really good one. But I'd really like the reverse: a bigass HD and MP3 server that's accessible via ethernet from my laptop. (I don't have desktops or servers at home - they take up way too much space.) I don't care so much about fan noise.

Still I might get this just 'cause its so damn cool.

Re:Neato

[imagi]

I you may want to look at this as a way to access your big wad of MP3's It's an HTML interface that selects songs and allows you to stream them to yourself.

http://www.turnstyle.com/andromeda/

How about putting it all in the remote control

[raynet]

What most AV-devices are missing is a bidirectional remote control with large screen. It would be great to have a remote with 256x256pixel or 40x25 screen, plenty of space for song, artist or genre names. Or maybe a even bigger screen with GUI and touch screen.

Re:How about putting it all in the remote control

[Brad Wilson]

I'm actually contemplating building a PC-based "whole home" audio system that uses a PC that you can bury in a closet or basement. The key difference would be the use of touch panels (full color) for navigation. Speakers in the ceiling, touch panels on the walls. More of a high end solution. I think long term this is a more interesting project that dumping a "PC-ish" thing into a stereo-rack sized box.

Streaming MP3...

[don_carnage]

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

Concider the following ...

[LoudMusic]

Most of the /. readers live in a small house or appartment. I would say the AudioTron is designed for people that have more than one computer in more than one room of a decent sized house and a stereo setup in another room. With a simple network run to the stereo equipment the user doesn't have to crank his computer speakers to listen to his mp3 collection in another room, or even through the whole house.

Most of my family would dig this device. Most of my friends would dig this device. There are just a few features that need to be added to get it up to snuff. There needs to be an easy software configuration for the PC so the user doesn't have to 'learn' windows networking to get it going, and the web interface needs to be streamlined and fluid.

I totally dig it, when the current beta reaches a finalized point (and I finish running my home network) I'm definitely buying an AudioTron.

~LoudMusic

what this really is

[wcb4]

is the pre-cursor to the next generation of music device that eventually everyone will buy. When broadband is ubiquitous in 10 years or so, then instead of actually buying cds of music, which eventually someone finds a way to copy, you will just diap up the songs that you want from a share on a public facing server sanctioned by the RIAA. THe songs and number of times you hit the server gets logged by your IP, and you get billed for each play of the song. Wanna talk about a draconian scheme.

I guess when fiber to the home is a reality, video will be delivered the same way, this way you do not own the dvd, you merely select the film and your digital video device reaches out to the net and plays your music. You never have the ability to capture it in any other form......ingenious actually. Quite ingenious. Now when those cd recording appliances that they sell now and new tape decks are encoded to look for cues within the audio and stop the copy process (macrovision for music) the pieces will all be in place. A decent dsl/cable modem can do music today, and even video cd/vhs quality video... in the not to distant future, you will not have any media or any of your usic or video, and no way of copying it, and no way of actually playing it even if you do copy it (yes, I realize this is playing off your lan now, but its quite possible to make it only connect to certain servers)

The recent beta firmwares are great

[cs668]

They really make this a first rate product. Turtle beach has been great about user requests on the mailing list and new fetures are added constantly.

riiiight- damaging equipment

[Anonymous Coward]

Hisses and clicks huh? so everybody with good hi-fi equipment will stop playing their vintage vinyl discs?

non-sinusodial waveforms (square waves, triangle waves, clipping-type distortion due to overdriving transistors, etc) is what damages equipment- especially speakers. With high enough compression, you'll get fidelity that's good enough to not have those problems. The analog components right after the DAC will probably smooth out the waveform steppings, anyway.

For that matter, one should be more worried about movie soundtracks damaging your "sensitive" hi-fi equipment.

Should I stop looking at jpegs on my sony monitor because it might improperly drive the electron guns? give me a break.

Rio Receiver

[jtseng]

The Rio Receiver seems to do the same thing. They have more information on their site and I suspect you can hook this up to a component home theatre system as well.

Actually I've ripped much more...

[FallLine]

If you get a fast cdrom, a decent CPU, and a good ripper/encoder, like MusicMatch, the entire process takes no more than 5 minutes or so per CD and requires no interaction other than inserting/removing the CD and pressing the record button. I'd argue that it actually saves me time, since I don't have to spend any time now hunting for CDs...

Re:Actually I've ripped much more...

[ncc74656]

If you get a fast cdrom, a decent CPU, and a good ripper/encoder, like MusicMatch, the entire process takes no more than 5 minutes or so per CD

How good is "good," though? What ripping and encoding engines does MusicMatch use if it's able to go that fast? EAC and LAME usually take around 20-30 minutes (IIRC) to reduce a CD to 160-kbps VBR MP3s, and that's on a 1.2-GHz Athlon with a 10x DVD-ROM under Win2K. Everything I've read indicates that those are the best ripper and the best encoder you can get right now. Some other encoders (like Xing) are really fast, but they sound like sh*t by comparison.

Re:Actually I've ripped much more...

[jshare]

I use the gogo encoder. As I understand it, it's basically LAME from some older version, but with key parts hand-optimized in assembler.

On my PIII-866 it can encode to 192kbit-CBR at about 24x realtime. So, the real bottleneck on my system is the ripping of the WAV off the CD. I use windac32, since it allows me to pipe from the CD straight into the gogo encoder, without an intervening WAV file. Otherwise, you end up doubling the time it takes, because you have one pass to write the wav, and a second pass just to encode it. Madness! :)

On my linux box (Athlon 600), I use abcde and gogo as the encoder. I can't pass the data straight through into gogo, but since it encodes in the background while ripping the next track, this really only matters at the end, when it's done ripping, but has just started encoding the last track. All previous tracks are always done encoding before the next track is done ripping.

If I had a better CDROM on that box, I'd probably get somewhere near the 3minute-rip-and-encodes that I get on my Windows box.

If you have a lot to rip, it is very much worth getting a drive that can do DAE at high speed. Mine peaks at about 26x realtime on the outside of a CD (inner tracks are only about 10-13x).

Re:Actually I've ripped much more...

[Fjord]

I use CDex on windows, which uses lame 1.2, and it only takes about 7-9 minutes to do a CD (windows 2000, 700 MHz Intel). It's freeware and you can get it at http://www.cdex.n3.net/

Re:Actually I've ripped much more...

[dickens]

cdex is it.

And don't miss the latest version with the CD-paranoia library included. It will make good copies even on poor quality cd drives.

Bah

[CaptainSuperBoy]

r3mix

Read it, then come back here with a clue.

Don't trust the web page, do some ABX tests on your reference system, comparing 256kbit MP3 to the original signal.

Oh, did you mean 128kbit MP3, encoded by Musicmatch, has hisses and skips? I whole heartedly agree with you! But if you believe that all MP3 < all CD, I have a $20,000 tube amp I'd like to sell you.

Assuming 256kbit MP3 done with a decent encoder, this component, and a Toslink connection to your badass DAC, I can assure you that the limiting factor there is the quality of your DAC and everything after it.

Re:Bah

[CaptainSuperBoy]

Well, I never said you should compress your MP3's at 10:1 (around 160kbit I think). 256kbit MP3's should yield roughly 5.5x compression. Again, I hope you don't take my word for it. Run your own ABX test in a controlled listening environment and check if you can hear the difference..

Even better

[Kartoffel]

The SliMP3 ethernet MP3 player.

Remember expertsexchange.com?

[kubrick]

Anybody wanna register "pcaudioshell.com"? ;-)

Is that "PC audio shell" or "PC audios hell"? :)

Go get Streamsicle

[justin_w_hall]

If you're looking for a quick, easy way to efficiently get music to every system in your house, go get Streamsicle. It's a java-based combo web/mp3 server. Point it to your MP3 directory/share and fire up the server, and it works. Here's our setup:

• A linux box running samba and the streamsicle server. The audio stream runs on TCP port 4711 and the web interface on 8080, but both are changeable to suit your needs. The server's pointed to /mnt/mp3s/ and the mp3 shares on all the machines in the house are smbmounted below that directory by computername (/mnt/mp3s/megatron, /mnt/mp3s/starscream, etc).
• The clients connect to the web interface (customizable easily by stylesheets) and play the stream. 7 clients play easily on our 100base network with no hiccups. For parties, we put every system in the house in IE kiosk mode for easy song requesting. The interface is sweet - mp3 index is searchable and you can skip/delete tracks from the playlist from anywhere (which makes for interesting arguments at parties :)
• One laptop has the audio line out going to the RCA in on our stereo system. Beautiful sound.
• Internet radio? Easy, just hit 8080/4711 on the server you're running from or port forward thru your firewall.

RC2 of this project is out and very stable. 1.0 is looking really sweet and from the ML it looks like it'll be out pretty soon. I really recommend it, as it's a cheap (free) solution to getting your whole house playing a music collection everywhere you have a PC.

...Or Buy This...

[ras_b]

Jensen Wireless Internet Audio Transmitter

one piece hooks up to your pc, the other to the rca inputs of your stereo. it will transmit the audio out of your computer to your stereo, and it's only $69 dollars. Mush less of a hassle, no wires, and it achieves the same result- the gig's of mp3's on your computer will play out of your stereo in a hassle free way.

Re:...Or Buy This...

[unitron]

However, since this only transmits the analog audio output from your soundcard you still have to leave the room where your stereo is to go to the room where your computer is to get it to play the song (as opposed to transferring the file) and then go back to the room where the stereo is, and if you change your mind and want to alter the playlist you've got to go back to the room with the computer, lather, rinse, repeat.

Using a shitty PC for MP3s is stupid!

[SensitiveMale]

Some people have nice homes.

Some people do NOT want a piece of shit P133 with a shitty 15" monitor and a ton of wires in each room. Sure you can basically the same thing with a cheap ass PC. But you 'Linux biased' idiots get it through your head that no everyone wants a rack and shitty PCs located throughout the house. And I would wager when you 'Linux biased' idiots grow up you may realize that having PCs throughout the house is just stupid.

Please get a sense of style and pick up those damn pizza boxes and vacuum the carpet.

Get get a REAL OS. Go buy a Mac and run OS X.

Re:Using a shitty PC for MP3s is stupid!

[digitalsushi]

Amen to that. I live in an apartment with one slobby roommate (he leaves the pizza boxes everywhere and trashes the carpet.. I clean them up.. We're like a straight Bert and Ernie) and we have three bed rooms. The largest bed room is the office. Two tables, cat5 everywhere, there's like, what, nine machines? ten? Who knows. It's a nightmare. Then there's coax and more cat5 and cat6 running down the stairs into my bedroom, or over to the living room. The cable is split 3 times. It's nasty. It looks like hell. It's impossible to make this garbage look nice.

When I have a nice house, it'll be cause I'm married and not allowed to have nerd junk littering the house. "Why don't you just pull out a dusty old 486 and put linux on it" is already a cliche, and if i'm ever allowed to play mp3s in the living room, you can be sure that device will have no used 14 inch monitor, no console cable, no keyboard, no mouse, nothing. Just a sexy black slab with a power cord, and unfortunately probably an RCA and ethernet jack.

Do I sound like every other post here? After I post, will I be able to tell which of these is mine?

Re:Using a shitty PC for MP3s is stupid!

[kaimiike1970]

We're like a straight Bert and Ernie

Wait just a goldurned minute! Are you trying to implythat Bert and Ernie are GAY?! Say it isn't so.

Re:Using a shitty PC for MP3s is stupid!

[unitron]

Bert and Ernie? Sounds more like Felix and Oscar.

(Now try to get the theme song out of your head--dat-da-dat-da-dah--da-da-da-dah...)

Sharing mp3s to mac clients.

[saintlupus]

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

Re:Sharing mp3s to mac clients.

[kilgore_47]

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.

My server's a RedHat box, and settng up netatalk is on my list of things to do on a rainy day. I've heard it's not hard to do, but I'm just real lazy (and my pc's already hooked up to the stero, so it's not a big priority). Eventually, I'd like to use the mac for the majority of my music listening because I prefer SoundJam over WinAmp (the ability to make psuedo-folders on the playlist from Artist and Album id3 tags is really cool).

I thought the 289 pricetag was a bit steep.

[t0qer]

You can get a intel mobo with integrated sound video, 64 megs of ram, cpu and ethernet (intel 810) for about the same price except that it's a real computer, vs some box that just play's mp3's. Maybe if it were in the sub 100 dollar range it could become "a must have" or "impulse buy" item but for the same price i would rather have a pc. If I wanted LCD I could just get a cheap seiko LCD controller and wire it up to the serial port.

--toq

Why this is a good thing

[dimer0]

This device is outstanding. To counter the "Why not get an apex player for $99", well, that's nice that it holds a CD's worth of mp3s, but most people have much more than that.

Also, this looks just like a normal stereo component. It fits in quite well with my existing rack. It has optical audio out, which sounds amazing, mostly when piping these mp3s through Dolby Pro Logic II. Couldn't ask for more.

Being able to pick which songs you want without having to go sit in front of a computer is a nice thing as well. I've programmed in all the functions on the remote to my Pronto, so I can pick songs from the same device I switch television stations with, etc.

I'd definetly recommend grabbing the beta firmware, which gives you access to control your device via a web browser, access to shoutcast streams, and much more.

The developers listen as well. There is a very active mailing list and also a great forum to learn more about this stuff.

Best thing is - Best Buy had these devices on clearance for a few months, and may still be doing this - letting them go for $149. I'm guessing the complexity of a home network was a bit too much for the average Best Buy shopper, dunno.

I love my Audiotron. I'd love to see a portable jam-box-like device with 802.11b support.. (slobber)

sigs suck.

Sounds cool but ...

[Christianfreak]

What I'd really like to see is a cheap hardware card that you could throw into that old P 90 you have laying around that would give you remote control capability. With a good sound card = instant stereo mp3 player that you could hook up with your other equipment ... just a thought..

Re:Sounds cool but ...

[ryanwright]

What I'd really like to see is a cheap hardware card that you could throw into that old P 90 you have laying around that would give you remote control capability.

Here you go: http://www.evation.com/irman/

Re:Sounds cool but ...

[linzeal]

Buy a cheap pacbell remote control

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid= 40&threadid=578471

thats what I have along with a flexatx case with an 8.4 gig hardrive some wireless intel game controlers and a webtv keyboard.

Re:Sounds cool but ...

[unitron]

Isn't pacbell Pacific Bell? Aren't you talking about Packard Bell?

Groove with me baby!

[silphium_laciniatum]

Added
OZONE. Makes winamp sound like older and better analog media (ie warmer and deeper).
GROOVY Now my PC thinks its an 8Track player.

Total Irony

[geekoid]

What group would not mind spending 300.00, running cables, and having to download something, to listen to lots of music? Audiophiles
who is the last people in the world that want to listen to MP3 on an high-fidelity system? Audiophiles.

Re:Total Irony

[cs668]

Actually the audiotron has a digital output which lets you use your expensive DAC( Reciever ) to get great sound from it.

I use it to have my cds stored away and not fumble with a changer. I also have 2 which means that my music is available to me in the familyroom and basement(playroom for the kids ).

I chalenge anyone to tell the difference between a cd and a high bitrate mp3 on a good sound system using the audiotrons digital output.

Wrong, it's not unusual. Why can't I have 400 CDs?

[aussersterne]

Above average?

Most of my friends have 300-600 CDs. I've got 400 here. Furthermore, where are you getting an average of 8 songs per CD? A sampling of 10 of my CDs (admittedly small sample, but sounds right) gives me an average of 11 songs per disc. Maybe we just like different genres of music?

I don't have mine all to MP3 either (I've scripted up for it and started the process a couple of times, but then LAME comes out with something new that sounds better and I start all over...) but thats an estimated 4,400 MP3's for me, and I don't consider myself a big music junkie...

I just have a collection that I've been building since the late '80s, that's all. Someone who's bought one CD a week for a decade has 520+ CDs now. That's no stretch of the imagination, it sounds very reasonable to me.

The anti-piracy assholes are getting out of control. I don't mind buying software or music, but I'm getting tired of having to defend my 400+ CDs or 200+ games every time the subject comes up. If nobody's going to believe that I bought them anyway, I wish I had just copied them from the beginning, god knows I'd be a lot richer right now.

Speaking of things that are too expensive...

[Esoteric Moniker]

Kind of kills the coolness factor of a great game console for $40 when you realize the NIC is 5x the cost of the DC itself.

Re:Speaking of things that are too expensive...

[jgerman]

Not at all, the coolness has little to do with the price but mostly is a result of being able to take a console and write your own stuff for it. Yeah it's great that it's only $40 and don't get me wrong that does score some points for it, but if it were $200 I'd have run out and bought it.

BTW 5x is a bit high, 2 to 2.5x is more accurate.
Though I won't be suprised when a creative hardware hacker homebrews one for $20 in parts.

Re:Better: buy the Apex player at Wal-Mart for $10

[rudedog]

Taco: I feel like eating an orange for lunch.
Emil: No, have this apple. It's much less hassle than an orange.

Hint: the two items are completely different. I link the Audiotron much better, because I don't have to put my mp3s onto cdr to play them on my stereo. Plus, my current collection would take around 30 CD's to hold it, and each time I wanted to create a playlist, it would mean another CD, unless my desired playlist just happened to have all the songs on a single CD.

No thanks.

(sigh)

[biggerboy]

Why do all the comments here seem to be centered around "uh, a computer could do that."

Right. A P90 won't fit on my stereo rack. And not everyone has their computer where their good stereo is.

I guess the razzes should be expected from this crowd who would drag a fileserver around the house if they needed it. Obviously this device is not necessarily targeted for this bunch.

Mp3 server on a wireless network.

[pmbuko]

I've got a system set up at home that is much better than this, as far as sheer geek factor is concerned. Components are as follows:

1 home stereo system
1 iBook w/VNC server loaded
1 Airport network
a couple other computers throughout the house

What I do is connect my iBook's sound-out to the stereo. I have a bunch of mp3s on the local hard drive, but I can also connect to my other computers to access more music. Once I have a satisfactory playlist setup, I start playing it and then tuck the iBook out of sight somewhere.

With VNC viewer, I can connect to my iBook from any other computer in the house mess around with the play order or skip tracks at will. Since I don't have a remote control for my iBook, this is the next best thing.

What's really great is that I can give friends the IP and pass for my iBook/VNC and they can pick my music for me. :)

Neato custom setup

[bdk3clash]

I've been dying to share the mp3 setup that my two roommates built from scratch.

Tucked away behind our couch is one of my roommate's old computers--a Pentium 133 or so. It functions as a dedicated mp3 server. All of the mp3s in our apartment are either stored locally on its hard drive or accessible to it via our network.

Attached to the computer is an IRMan, which sits discretely on top of our stereo receiver. Additionally, the computer outputs sound into the receiver (duh).

To actually play the mp3s via the stereo, one of my roommates wrote a custom interface for his Phillips Pronto remote that has a "button" for EACH and every album in our collection, sorted alphabetically by artist. Combined with the Pronto's ability to do multiple actions with one button press, we've got push button access to any album in our collection.

Another Option.

[Tingler]

This was my solution:

http://www.soundblaster.com/accessories/optical- io /

http://www.quietpc.com/silentdrive.html

http://www.quietpc.com/psu.html

http://www.quietpc.com/cpucooling.php#amdrf

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds60gxp.htm

http://www.dynamat.com/

http://www.baber.com/baber/products/mpe_dk2.htm

I noticed that a lot of noise comes from the fan guards. I cleaned up the fan inputs & outputs with a dremal. That allowed more airflow & it keeps the noise down. I covered everything with the dynamat, & that helps the noise also. I bought a 60 gig IBM drive, any larger & it would produce too much heat for the quietdrive.

The SoundBlaster adapter allows me to connect directly to my Yamaha receiver's optical digital input.

I must say I am happy with the results.

Neglected to explain that...

[gmplague]

You neglected to explain that at least one computer must be on for you to use this. While this may be OK for the /. crowd, it just doesn't cut it for the typical consumer.

It runs WinCE -- and Bill Gates likes it!

[leighklotz]

At WinHec 2000, Bill Gates said

...this device here is the Turtle Beach Audiotron. What this device is, and this is a Windows CE based device, that lives in your audio stereo component.

Comb computer shows for used equipment

[uradu]

I picked up a Unisys Aquanta CP at a show last weekend for $44. It's really tiny (about the size of the Yellow Pages of a decent size city), has a Pentium 166MMX, 32MB RAM, 2 PCI/1 ISA, Trio64V+ video, Ethernet, COM1, 2 USB, floppy, 2 IDE connectors. All I need is a PCI sound card, plus some Linux distro and software to tie it all together into an MP3 box. If I don't find anything, I'll just roll my own.

dreampt

[underpaidISPtech]

Is it all I'd dreampt about?

Sheesh. Maybe Taco needs to dream about a spellchecker. It really is getting wurse ;P

All it needs is..

[uradu]

the ability to play MPEG4, so I don't have to burn wretched VCDs anymore. Oh, and maybe a NIC so it can play movies from the network, like a PC or the TiVo. Then again, my TiVO is closer to this already. Ok, what we need is a fully integrated media device, with DVD, MP3, TiVO, etc. How does that relate to the Apex? It doesn't.

All you need is...

[uradu]

a piece of software to automate the insertion and removal of CDs. Wait, or is that hardware?

Re:SO MUCH MUSIC

[kaimiike1970]

I have one of these (Sony 200 disc changer) and it sucks. The interface sucks, I can never remember/figure out which cds are in there or what number they are. Why, oh why, can't it access the CDDB database! Most of the time I set it to shuffle and there is a 5-10 second pause while the spindle, swivels, unloads a disc, and reloads a new disc. This is a significant amount of time. Additionally, the laser sucks. Sound quality is far inferior to my single disc player. While a 150-200-300 disc changer 'sounds' cool it is not.

Re:Better: buy the Apex player at Wal-Mart for $10

[eschatfische]

The Apex, and it's ilk, can access one CDR's worth of MP3s. 650mb. You're talking around 170 4 minute songs on a CD.

Some people, like CmdrTaco, have 6500 MP3s. That would mean that he would need a library of almost 40 CDRs sitting next to his Apex to listen to his whole library. Less hassle? Hardly. The AudioTron lets you use a share on your server to access all of your MP3s with one interface, as opposed to flipping through a seemingly endless number of CDs.

Eschatfische.

$149 RIO receiver

[zerofoo]

I purchased a RIO receiver from Best Buy for $149 and let me tell you....it's not all it's cracked up to be.

First, the software doesn't run as a service on windows, you must manually run the software (stupid if you have a server in your house).

Second, the RIO receiver emits a high frequency noise from its case, not through the audio. Don't know what causes this.

Third, the screen is too damn small. A TV output display would have been a better option.

The Turtle Beach product is probably worth $300 if it doesn't have these problems.

-ted

"Label" != "RIAA label"

[yerricde]

we also know that Taco has given the RIAA about $6500 dollars

Not all major labels are RIAA labels. For instance, many labels specializing in smaller bands or electronic dance music do not belong to the RIAA.

Not all MP3.com artists suck

[yerricde]

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.

Re:Not all MP3.com artists suck

[epsalon]

And there are non-mp3.com tracks that are a MUST, such as "CSS-Descramble" :)

Hmm.

[mindstrm]

Can it handle live streaming.. that's the one thing I'd really like to see in a component like this. I want to be able to listen to shoutcast from the living room.

Re:Hmm.

[cheesebot]

yes, with the beta firmware updates. it's not documented on the site though - you have to be on their mailing list.

Sure.. if you are a geek.

[mindstrm]

Some of us like the convenience of something we don't have to fuck with. I fuck with computers all day long.. I just don't have the time to build something to do this. This thing is cheap, looks sharp, and is useful...

You also seem to assume that everyone in the world knows how to mess with an old PC to re-vamp it for there stereo system. I can assure you, they coulnd't be bothered. THey'd much rather drop $300, and set up a share on their Windows PC where all their napster downloads are, and have something their freinds will be jealous of.

Bingo.

[mindstrm]

I've often thought... what I picture in my house someday (when I get a house) is that there will be a rack in the basement with all my servers, backup, telecom, etc.... and then just lightweight terminals here and there in the house, plus appliances like this one. THAT would be idea.

Man am *I* an idiot

[The AtomicPunk]

I thought I could solve this problem with a $5 patch cable from my Sound Blaster Live into my stereo system. Little did I know I really needed to spend $300 on this killer audio system component instead.

I also appreciate that there's a convenient link where I can buy this device on one of Slashdot's main advertisers. That sure is a helpful coincidence.

Courtney Love did the math

[yerricde]

they don't get zero

Courtney Love did the math and found that, after the recording company recoups the cost of recording and promoting the record, most artists get a pittance. According to some lobbyists, this corporate authorship scenario "would have never happened if Sonny Bono was still alive." (However, the name Sonny Bono brings up other issues.)

Please, spare me the propaganda

[festers]

You are being fed Fear and Lies from the media. Make sure you know the facts.

Best Buy had them for $139

[openbear]

Best Buy had them for $139 a few months ago. I bought three of them (one for the livingroom, bedroom, and my geekroom). I have no regrets. If you can find them for under $200 then I would highly recommend getting two.

I'm surprised that you didn't mention the fact that they do streaming net radio. The firmware that comes with the box is weak, but if you upgrade to the latest you get a bunch of cool functionality.

And as far as there being an XML/RPC interface, with one of the later beta firmware upgrades there is an http interface that returns plain text for easy parsing so you could build your own interface if you wanted. (I forgot where the link to that was, but I think it was somewhere on this site)

Re:$289? Hell no, DIY...

[ksw2]

Um, maybe I'm missing something, how is that a troll?

Touchscreen Jukebox

[MrBlue VT]

I've written a much better stereo jukebox application. It works best with a touchscreen monitor (can be picked up on eBay for ~50). Basically it allows you to select a bunch of songs that will queue up and play in order like a real jukebox. Great for parties. Run it on a linux machine and mount your windows/samba shares and have at it. Its written in Java so it'll work on any machine with a JVM.

Naturally its open source, but I still have to package it together for a release. You can see screen shots and more descriptions at my website.

-Steve Allen

Crap CDs: copy protection and dynamic compression

[yerricde]

Pops are caused by crap ripping software/cd-rom/cd's introducing noises into the original source, not by the encoder.

Yes, I'd like to stress "crap CDs." Some CDs come defective when purchased, presumably to make copying more difficult. That said, the makers of next-gen CD burners will probably make the interpolation in the players' digital audio extraction more robust. Other CDs have no punch in the percussion because mastering has compressed all the dynamics out of them, as they are designed for play in a noisy vehicle and/or through a noisy FM channel, not in a quiet audiophile rig.

I'd buy this if...

[renehollan]

...it could retrieve and play UNCOMPRESSED raw WAV files. Yes, I'm willing to allocate 200 Gb to my music collection. No, I will not compress the hell out of my music (well, not most of it anyway).

Re:I'd buy this if...

[bucky0]

Encode it at 320kbps and I think it's CD-Quality

Re:I'd buy this if...

[Brad Wilson]

It plays MP3, WMA, and WAV (yes, uncompressed). Now go to Best Buy and get one for $150. :)

128 kbps does suck, but...

[yerricde]

no, the limiting factor is the 10:1 lossy mp3 compression

Yes, 128 kbps MP3 (11:1 vs. CD) loses depth. However, r3mix.net has done some tests showing that LAME can do transparent encoding of stereo audio at 192 to 256 kbps, using variable bitrate to encode the audio with only slight psychoacoustic loss that most listeners won't notice.

tell ya the truth, cd's arent that good sounding either

I addressed poor CD mastering in this comment.

my gripes

[binaryfeed]

I own one of these. My gripes:

1. You can skip through a song.
2. The ID3 support is pretty weak. That is, it can't detect "similar artists" and group them together.

Still, though, it's the closest thing to what I want that exists so far, so I make do.

Re:my gripes

[binaryfeed]

Errr. I mean you CANNOT skip through a song. Damn. I even hit Preview this time.

CD includes error checking

[yerricde]

One format is smaller and includes error checking. The other does not.

The Red Book audio CD standard includes error correcting codes, but some record labels have begun to exploit them in mastering to make the CDs harder to fairly use. (See also my earlier comment.)

Re:CD includes error checking

[shepd]

>The Red Book audio CD standard includes error correcting codes

Quite right. I should have said that most CD players will attempt to correct (and ultimately will play) errors that are uncorrectable, producing some very horrible noise; whereas a decent MP3 player should skip damaged MP3 frames completely.

Not xmms-cross fade - hang the DJ

[Mike McTernan]

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...

Re:Shameless Marketing

[BLAG-blast]

Oh really? Think geek sells these? This isn't an obvious attempt to squeeze a few more bucks out of us, is it?

(Wish I had some mod points....)

I don't think taco has done that much writting before, notice that he even spell checked it. My guess is that /. has to plug more of it advertisers products. It's not as if he is lying about the quality of the product, but the Think geek references would leave you thinking that they make them...

I normally don't read what taco says because he can spout some dumb ass comments sometimes. The other option is a slower loading slashdot (i.e. without VA paying for it's bandwith), so I don't mind, slashdot is still useful even if what taco says is being paid for by adverisers.

Availability in Canada

[gss]

Has anyone seen on of these available in any stores in Canada? I would order one from Turtle Beach but it would kind of be nice to avoid shipping and duty.

Re:Shameless Marketing

[shokk]

If you're a gambler, check ebay for these. They were selling for $199 before September, but now they have disappeared off the Best Buy shelves and are creeping up in price close to the retail price. The problem is you don't get the warranty with these since most are pre-opened store models. A buddy of mine got one of these but had to pay $50 for Turtle Beach to repair it after it died from overheating. That plus shipping means you should just buy it off a store.

No fan noise...

[Burnon]

Taco mentioned that you won't get fan noise from this hardware. If I'm actually going to listen to MP3's, I'm going to want to get rid of all of the ambient noise sources that I can. Any PC is going to add too much fan noise to an already lossy format.
The toslink is a nice bonus there too, but I wonder if it has any really noticeable effect at all.

Besides that, there's no room for a PC in my stereo rack!

128, 192, 256 and mp3 "quality"

[nikster]

i read an audio test in a very respectable tech mag recently (www.heise.de). they got a bunch of musicians/audiophiles in a professional studio with $100k+ equipment and did blind tests of CD vs 128, 192, 256 bits
result: no one could reliably tell 256 bit encoded mp3s from CDs. almost everybody could tell 128 bit mp3 apart, but 192 already proved difficult.

that doesn't mean that there are not crappy encoders that produce bad mp3, crappy D/A converters that make the best mp3 sound bad, or other _bad_ things before the sound reaches your ear.

but it proves to me that the mp3 format - given good encoders and components - is good enough for me.

other interesting tidbits from the test:

- some musical sequences are extremely hard to encode and were obviously distorted at anything below 256 bit - but at 256, they were fine.
- one person could tell CDs from mp3s reliably. it turned out this person had a hearing disability that enabled him to clearly hear a difference. he couldn't tell which one sounded 'better' though. he could only say "this is the one" and "this is the other"...

YMMV, but for most practical purposes, i would recommend mp3s. for storage/collecting, i would go with CDs. to put this in the strongest words: yes, i really think mp3s sound nearly as good as CDs. :-)

Refreshing the song list

[entrigant]

I find it surprising that no one has mentioned that if you ever REMOVE a song from the shared directory you have to either turn the unit off from the backside or unplug it before it erases that song from its internal cache. All the "refresh" button does is add new songs.. it doesn't remove old ones.

Just kinda found that a tad bit annoying..

tv support

[w3grmln]

The biggest thing i could think of as a want would be an mp3 player that has a lan connection.. cd player, and tv support... tv support yes that would be nice, do they make any mp3 players with lan connect and tv support ?