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Review: SliMP3
So what is it? Its a small MP3 player with no internal storage of its own. It has an ethernet port, RCA audio outputs (you'll need an external amp!), and a power plug. It has a really bright little screen for displaying song information and a remote. It's about the size of a car stereo faceplate, but a little thicker.
It doesn't have a fancy plastic box. The backside is simply an exposed circuit board. But thats sorta the idea: this is a toy that can work for users, but is also hugely designed to be a hacker toy.
Configuring the device is easy. The latest version has DHCP, but I tested it on a network that lacked the protocol. I put the IP in of my 'Server' and gave the unit its own IP and I was off and running. The server is a perl program you download from the Slim Devices web site. It supposedly will run on on Linux, Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, BeOS, and MacOSX. It worked great on my linux box. Trivially easy. This unit was the easiest to set up of any MP3 player I have ever used. Of course, I was already running Linux and had Perl ;)
You can control the SliMP3 with a remote control, but the server optionally can just serve up HTML on a high port number and set your playlists up via an acceptable web interface. And since its perl, its all ready for you to hack yourself. The code itself is fairly legible... there's a mailing list, and it is actively being developed.
The closest competitor to the SliMP3 is the Audiotron. The audiotron is almost the same price, has an optical output, a more developed HTML interface, and is physically a nice stereo component. It is a far more mature product. But the audiotron uses SMB file sharing and controls everything within itself. The SliMP3 uses an open source server program to stream the audio to the player. So the smarts are mostly on the PC. Which of course lends itself to easy hacking.
The interface currently is pretty sparse. Some places display filenames where ID3 tags would be preferred. I was unable to get it to load a 20,000 track playlist. But the server software is under active development, and these things should both be resolved in a not-so-distant release.
There are a variety of cool projects that could conceivably be hacked into this thing. A GTK-Perl interface would be super smooth. Cross-fade functions. Intelligent playlist creation. Tivo style thumbs up-thumbs down track rating for music playback. And this is the first MP3 player I've seen that things like this are possible because the code is right there and ready to rip apart. It's even legible!
If you need a pretty box, or demand optical connections to your reciever, go with the audiotron. If you want something tiny, or just want to hack at your MP3 player stereo component, this is a great way to go.
Does this really mean anything, considering the source? I've never looked at Slashcode, but I've heard rumors...
Building one of your own players:
http://www.pjrc.com/
But I like the iPod more.
You're an Mp3 Junkie??? We couldnt tell! You really did a good job of hiding it!
I've got just a few questions about MP3 players:
Software
Which MP3 player has the smallest memory footprint/is the least taxing on the system in Windows? In Linux?
Hardware
Which portable MP3 player has the smallest form factor? How about smallest form factor with the most memory (say, 64 or 128 MB)?
My sigs always suck.
Pretty cool, but I'm waiting for a player that supports ogg files too, since all my own music is encoded that way. Once there's a nice high storage player that supports oggs too, I'll go for it.
:-)
I also see a fairly limited use for this sort of thing, since most people probably want a player that has a fair amount of local storage. While this thing is really cool if you're on a network, most of us don't really have the capability to use it. I wish I was on the kind of network that would allow this to be useful though.
Now totally OT, but I'm glad Taco's been posting today again. He's still got the best story choices of all the editors.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I've seen some blatant advertising on /. before, but nothing like this. This device is not innovative or new--it plays MP3's. Half the readers of this site have built something more effective (or at least claim to have done so) and probably for 2/3 the price. Is this OSDN's new revenue model? Using Taco as a SpokesDroid for hackneyed wares?
Hate trolls? Troll 'em back...at home!
Please, if you are going to review mp3 players--especially ones of a "hackable" nature--PLEASE mention what hoops we'll have to go through to get Ogg files to play. Does it decode the mp3 in hardware? Does it have uploadable firmware? Are the firmware/internals available also? Any mention in docs or on their site? These are things we want to know.
What is the point of controlling it from your computer? Why not use WinAmp? If you're running ethernet to your stereo so you can use this little device, wouldn't it be cheaper to just run audio cable to the stereo? It's a cool product, I guess, but I just couldn't see shelling out that much money for a device that will give me zero extra functionality over a PC with a soundcard, especially when that device still requires the PC.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
We already went down this road with the Auditron (sp?) review. And this product can't even be stacked on other stereo gear. So how useful is this thing? It's basically a PC remote control, yes?
I guess my house just isn't big enough. I simply walk 20 feet to the back of the house and fiddle with my software MP3 player on my computer when I want to hear MP3's. I've got nice powered speakers, and it sounds just fine. Running CAT5 cable from my back bedroom to my living room would be more of a pain that it is worth.
And again, this thing isn't even really a stereo component.
$250+ for an MP3 player that doesn't have it's own storage with a display that doesn't exactly look as professional as other MP3 players on the market...
And it's not even availiable yet! I wonder how CmdrTaco got his. A "free" review copy perhaps?
For $10 you can get PalmAmp software to operate WinAmp/XMMS remotely. Add some extra-long speaker cables, and you've got a more functional version of this for a whole lot less. But this is still pretty cool.
Confirmed by the AP, see for yourself at the link below !
You linked to yahoo.com's redirector in such a way that the redirector links to gay porn. Parent should be modded (Score:-1, Offtopic).
1981: "The server runs a stripped-down version of Unix hacked somehow into working on the i386 platform."
1991: "The server runs a stripped-down version of Linux hacked somehow into running Apache."
2001: "The server is a perl program." [see text]
"Frequent readers of slashdot know I'm..."
Trolling for Jesus?
Since when is anybody's Perl code legible? And besides, CT is *certainly* not the best judge of legibility... hell, he thinks Duckpins is funny...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
for almost 300 USD i woudl expect a bit more from an mp3 player. i mean the only practicle use i could think of this would be for changing mp3s in the bathroom, which would be cool but not 300US cool. I dont know why you couldnt just run an audio cable from the pc to the stereo. i guess if you had drops all over your house than this might be cool, but i would rather have this sort of thing with soem sort of ide controller for laptop hdds and possibly a car mounting kit. i think that would drive it out of a niche market and into something that i wouldnt mind paying some cash for.
-
it would be really cool to include a built in option for 802.11b or a PCMCIA for that.
Imagine that, you can play mp3s anywhere around the house.
I guess I will stick with laptop + 802.11b for now.
kawai
I think we are moving towards at least partial (read: sensible) convergence- I could see features like this on DVD units in the future (actually doesn't the XBox- yeah yeah the satan box I know - have the ability to store some songs for playback during games...or is it the games that are stored so that you can put in your own CDs??).
For now I picked up one of those CD-RW MP3 capable discman (SORRY personal Cd player dealy...don't want to get sued by Sony! hehe it's a Citizen) - is it just me or does *everything* able to read MP3s these days? The discman just hooks up through a standard 1/8" to RCA splitter through it's line out....if only it had a remote!
But it'd be cool to have functionality like this built into my 12.1 Dolby Digital stereo receiver some day in the not to distant future! Although there is something to be said for having different components...
These are beer-guided MP3 players, evidinced by the second photograph down.
Not sure I want my MPEG decoder chips soldered by some beer-swilling hacker... :)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
The only people who can stand to listen to mp3s on a regular basis have shitty stereos.
Drop a few $s on a decent setup Tacoman.
CC
CmdrTaco, why on earth would you want to have a 20,000 song playlist? I can see having that many mp3s, and even wanting to load them all in the same playlist, but damn, what happens if you have an alphabetized list and you're listening to something in "A", and you want to listen to something in "S" ? You're going to be holding the down key on that remote for a LOOONG time. This leads me to an idea, maybe at some point in a high number of songs, your playlist should (maybe it already does, I don't know, I don't have anywhere near that many mp3s) instead of displaying the name of every track, to instead just display the album titles, then when you select an album title, it expands to a song list. that would cut down the listing from 20,000, to probably less than 1,000.
I guess the beauty of this product is that you could just modify the script and have it produce something like that.
-- Dan
The closest competitor to the SliMP3 is the Audiotron.
:)
I'm amazed how few people know of the Rio Receiver. It's a great little box, can be found on eBay fairly cheaply, and there's even a couple of Linux servers out for it (check out JReceiver for a hideously-complicated but wicked-cool mpeg server back-end. It's designed to interface to multiple types of systems, and could probably even have an interface built for the SliMP3.)
$250+ for an MP3 player that doesn't have it's own storage
I'm further amazed by how many people on slashdot apparently don't have networks. If I've got 30G (or more, maybe, haven't looked at the total lately) of MP3s, I don't want to have to deal with replicating that collection on different MP3 players scattered all over the house. Put it all on one box, and let smart devices do the playing. That's what SliMP3, AudioTron, and Rio are all about. Store once, play anywhere.
Now if we could only get this to be a VideoLAN client, too...
Haven't seen this feature, but curious if someone has seen it around: I hate having to burn separate CDs for my car. I could get a car audio mp3 player, but I would have the same inconveniences.
Why can't a portable mp3 player with gobs of music merely plug in to the car audio? One source of music...
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
I would still like to see the "industry" recognize the need for a "disposable" PC form factor. Instead of ZIF sockets and DIMMs, put the memory and processor right on the motherboard (BGA packaging)along with all the other integrated components. Video, network, modem, sound, etc. If there were a couple USB or firewire ports, this would provide for cheap expansion into any multitude of devices.
Perhaps this way, an "open notebook" could develop as well as open Mp3 players. Since the actual board would be tiny, there would be many uses. Hell - flat panel makers could use them to convert an ordinary flat panel monitor into a full terminal (firewire hard or network boot drive optional).
Has anyone priced PC parts these days? Get rid of the fluff and put everything on one standards based board and you have a cheap, universal PC for use in ANYTHING including Mp3 players that would otherwise cost $270 like the one we see here.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I just wish this thing had a PCMCIA slot and could support IEEE 802.11. Streaming the MP3s from my main desk machine to my stereo is definitely the solution i'm most interested in, but there's no way i'm going to pull an ethernet cable all the way across the house for this.
I typically NFS-mount my MP3 partition over the wireless network on my laptop, then use the laptop to stream music, but i'm looking for a permanent stereo component to do this. Guess i'll have to build my own.
DZM
These are the types of devices that could really take advantage of wireless networking. As an earlier post said, what's the point if you have to run an ethernet cable, why not just run audio from your pc? If it was 802.11 compliant, then no cables would have to be run out of the stereo area.
Seriously though I happened to notice the specs at http://www.slimdevices.com/features.shtml, and that the CPU is a Microchip PIC16F877 : For anyone who has used one of these, you quickly learned that using the term CPU related to one of these is a bit of a misnomer.
Did you know that you can put OS X on your iPod and use it as a boot disk on any other computer? All for only $400!
It is a well known fact that Jesus, AKA the Lord, OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR, Son of God, Chuy, etc... Was in fact a troll. This whole turn the other cheek thing, for example is a fairly obvious troll. If only they had a moderation system in the first few years of the common era, this could have been mod'd out of our view.
There are other examples of Jesus trolling his disciples. Stopping the flow of blood for that old lady, for example. He invented the tampax, and trolled it as a miracle. The list could surely continue.
In conclussion, let us all make WWJD our mantra. Let us troll for Jesus.
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
this article looks kind of familiar. Is there something new now? Are they slightly closer to a finished product?
I wrote a playlist generator and a frontend for it that has a thumb up/down feature. :) I thought you might enjoy it. You could easily adapt ti for use in such an app for the SliMp3.
m s/ sondra/
source, screenshots (of frontend), etc:
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/desktop/progra
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Fuck Islam. Death to Allah. Death to the godless sand niggers. God bless America.
Yet another useless pile of electronic parts. All it does is read MP3 files over a network connection. Big whoop. You still need the PC running 24/7 to provide the files. Why not just run a $10 RCA patch cable from the computer to your stereo if you want to play MP3s? That has an even smaller footprint.
Presumably you can have multiple players on the same network, each playing back different content from the same centralized server.
The idea here, which I particularly like, is that you'd set up one "server" with stored copies of all your MP3s on it, and then put one of these and a pair of powered speakers in each room where you want music: the bedroom, the kitchen, the dungeon, etc. That way, you can play any music from any room in the house at any time without needing complete stored copies of the whole collection in each room.
Now all it needs is a built-in 802.11b wireless ethernet setup...
-Mark
CmdrTaco writes, "Frequent readers of Slashdot know that I'm an MP3 junkie."
I've installed a mp3 player in a friends car, and have also built myself a stereo component. I searched high and low for something that fit my price range and I came across this little bad boy.
This is the PRJC 8051 based MP3 player. For $150 bucks you get a small board with a IDE interface and Fully open source software. I'm not a programmer, i'm a hardware monkey as the developers call me, but I do know the buzzwords they like to hear like it can be compiled with cygwin, flash upgradeable, ect. The neat thing about this is if you have old 72 pin simms laying around they can be used for extra buffer space. I'm not an audiophile, but we're talking MP3 here, needless to say the sound quality is good. You can hook up cheap LCD displays to it (cheap as in 5 to 10 bucks) On top of all that you can add ANY IDE hard drive to it as long as it's formatted fat32. mount -t fat32 /dev/hd2 /mnt/mp3. Both of these I put together ended up in wood
boxes that I sanded, stained and lacquered myself. They are more beautiful
than anything you could buy (deep dark cherry wood color ooooh) The one in my
friends low rider goes well with the rest of the theme of his car.
I'm glad to see slashdot reporting on these types of open source mp3 players, in these hard economic times just walking into fry's and buying what you want is no longer a reality.
I realize that this article is about a home MP3 system, so this may be slightly off topic, but I just bought an awesome MP3 player.
It's the Diva3032 MP3 player. I got it for $69 with 32 megs built in. But the best part is that it takes CompactFlash, up to 2 Gigs (!!!). And when you plug it in (under win2k, maybe linux?) it automatically mounts as an additional drive letter so you can drag and drop MP3's on (and off) it.
So I got a 128 MB CF card off of pricewatch for $48 and now I have a 160MB player for $120.
It's about _half_ the size of a deck of cards, and runs for (supposedly) 10 hours on a single battery. The digital display is pretty lacking, but who cares if it's in your pocket? The sound quality is good, and the volume goes high enough to hurt my ears.
I went to this after bad experiences with a JazzPiper/Cabo, and even worse experiences with the Toshiba MEA-110. The Cabo's parallel connection just plain stopped working, and the Toshiba uses a "library manager" so draconian it makes me want to die.
My current idea is this - I have seen a CompactFlash to PCMCIA adapter. Heck I have even seen a CF to IDE adapter (the wrong way though). So why not plug a freakin hard drive in it when you are in the car? I think all you need is 5V. Does anyone have any experience with this?
I promise I am not the guy selling these, but the main page is at www.mydivaplayer.com and the place i got it for $69 is at www.mydigitaldiscount.com. Shamless plugging, I know, please keep the flames to a low broil.
Just my 2 cents.
muerte
You can have your standard playlist manager, but theres another way of managing your music, which allows you to query by artist, album, year, genre. Double click on an album, and boom, its in your playlist. Really slick. Nullsoft rules.
Captain_Frisk
Just over one year ago, Rob posted a story about my little Open-Source MP3 Player Project... which also isn't the first open-source design (but it may be the first open-source player that you can buy the hardware instead of buying all the individual chips and soldering them yourself).
Well, enough shameless self promotion for one day....
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I had the misfortune to watch that and the ridiculous bowling 'toons the other day. I still haven't recovered -- what unfunny tripe. His little comic strips were much the same.
Sounds like a great use for the "player" would be with the Phatbox.
I happily take my iPod to the stereo however. works fine if you have 4.6 GB of tunes.
sulli
RTFJ.
Most of the replies to your question stated that the quality loss of transmitting an audio signal is the reason for instead transmitting it over Ethernet: When most people use 128Kbps MP3 encoding, I find the idea of bringing up quality bizarre, however there is a good point that with most regular cables the attenuation of high frequencies will be unacceptable.
Having said that it does seem to me that a better solution would be a digital radio transmitter on your PC and a receiver on your stereo, perhaps with a remote or something. One example I found was Mp3 Anywhere (as if X10 needs to be linked to...but anyways). Bleh.
With 269$ you can take that k6-II that everyone has just lying around, drop in a soundblaster live with SPIDF out, a 20$ Trident card with video out, and a wireless keyboard and have yourself a mp3 box. You can still run ethernet to a hub and listen to MP3s stored on other machines around the house. Plus, you can surf the web and watch DVDs on your TV if you like.
hhhrm...
:)I know it's already running Linux and Perl, but I don't think reuse is a good idea in this case.
bash# nmap slashdot.org
Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA29 (www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on slashdot.org (64.28.67.150):
(The 1542 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port State Service
21/tcp open ftp
22/tcp open ssh
80/tcp open httpd
21345/tcp open SliMP3d
Remote operating system guess: Linux 2.2.13
Maybe you might want to put it on another box.
--I hate people when they're not polite -"Psycho Killer", Talking Heads
I've had one for about 2 months now (after being on the waiting list for many weeks!), and I love it!
I've got a PC running Win2K (yeah, I know, but my Linux box doesn't have enough storage space) with a huge HD full of MP3s. -- The PC sits downstairs in my "office" and the SliMP3 sits in my ONKYO stereo system's rack.
I can't tell you how great it is to use a remote to quickly find a (ripped) CD and play it, without rummaging through my hundreds of disks. Also the you can play (sequentially or randomly) all of the files under a given directory... for example, doing so on music/jazz - would play all the tunes from the artists/albums I have stored under jazz. I have been able to make -huge-playlists, but haven't tried one of the 20,000 size Mr. Taco mentions.
Also nice is it's abilitiy to connect through my gateway and play streaming audio from the internet.
Love it, Love it, Love it!
Stop covering these MP3 players and help these people by writing their story about how the Arabs have been enslaving them.
Nothing makes better music than a free person's self-expression of happiness. God loves us all making our music daily and not recording it once and sitting on our duffs doing nothing.
Help free the slaves! Visit Reverend Rod Parsley's website at www.breathrough.net to help buy these slaves back their family and their freedom! Visit Hal Lindsey's website at www.hallindsey.com and read why the United Nations is the platform for the Anti Christ and how they are an organization that does nothing to help people. Act now and act quickly!
without prejudice
Doing some rough calculations using about 15 songs per CD at about $15 per CD, we get $20k worth of CD's!!!! Now CT either:
a) napstered them.
b) gave $20k * 99% (less 1% for the artists) to the RIAA.
t.
I'd buy this like a shot (if you could buy one at all right now, natch) if it, instead of having a wall-wart for volts, had volts over CAT5 (including volts for an amp) just like the 3com 4-port face-plate on /. last week, or the Cisco W-LAN AP's. I'd even pay $50 on top of the asking price (converted into GBP)...
That way I can just flood-wire my house with CAT5 - as every good geek should - and plug this sucker in most anywhere along with a pair of passive speakers to get sounds...
I wonder if they're going to offer it in kit form? It'd be cool to do a battery version with a W-LAN card...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
I built a jukebox out of a P200, FreeBSD, a SB AWE32 PCI and Webplay.
Webplay kicks ass. I can fire up the tunes from any PC in the house -- streaming, if I want to use headphones at a computer, or I can feed the audio into my stero... or both at the same time.
There are apparently hacks to enable a digital audio output port on the cheapo SoundBlaster Live! cards. Once I do this I can even have my nice Yamaha receiver do the D/A conversion for better sound quality. (yeah, MP3, I know, but I use high bitrates and they can sound pretty good to me at least.)
Once I get a bigger hard drive in the jukebox I'll be able to use it as the home's general-purpose file server too.
For me, a PC-based solution is better than a component-based solution. The web interface alone cinches it. I don't even miss the remote contol, though one can probably be hacked in there.
This is a very versatile appliance. The display isn't limited to showing the song title, as far as I can tell; you could have it showing system stats, e-mail, or pretty much anything else you want. And the IR interface doesn't interpret the signals, so the raw IR data goes back to the server. With a little hacking, you could have a 2-line console operating anywhere you want, using an IR keyboard to control it.
You could always hook this thing directly into a WAP, and then bridge that to the WAP at your PC. I know its not the cheapest or easiest way to do it, but it *would* work.
I figure might as well just go out and buy a decent integrated system. A nice uber integrated mini-atx shuttle fv24 motherboard ($120), a nice low cost celeron ($50), 128 mb of ram ($15), a mini-atx case ($50) and an a SB Live ($35). $270 on the dot, with way more than you'll ever need for a glorified mp3 player.
Plus, if you get enough of em, you can start beowulfing them! Lets see you do that with your stereo's mp3 head! =]
peace.
myren out.
Wanna see the goatmans sphincter sing the impossible dream from man of la_mancha?
t it &lid=14
http://www.zeromag.com/zero4/download.php?op=ge
Ole'
Before giving a thumbs up to an MP3 player, these days, it should already play Ogg files, or you should have a commitment from the manufacturer that they will have an Ogg decoder upgrade by some specific date. It's not as if it would cost them anything.
The SliMP3 seems like a cool gadget, and obviously way more hackable than the Audiotron (which doesn't actually seem hackable). But unless you really want to hack on the thing, the Audiotron seems the way to go. The price difference is fairly small (~$40US), and you get a case, optical digital output, actual front-panel controls (more on the remote, but not required), Ethernet & HPNA (okay, HPNA is ugly, but it's there), DHCP, and no proprietary server required.
I just got an Audiotron, and it's awesome. I have it set up to run over 802.11b off my Linux box using Samba. Lots of buffering in the unit, so heavy concurrent use of the network doesn't faze it at all. As a test I pulled the enet cable and it just kept running. The menu organization is powerful and close to how I would have done it. The web interface is all you need to configure the unit, so the Windoze config utility they give you is unnecessary. And you can control the unit from the web interface too, in addition to the front panel controls or the remote. All in all, it's a very nice unit, and doesn't have that "science project" feel I get from looking at the SliMP3 pictures.
Although, if I wanted to do a science project, I'd go for the SliMP3.
They should be marketing the "Digital receiver" and a digital media server for businesses.
With that they could wire music into every were there is a existing network drop.
With a little modification to the software on the server I am sure they could do forced broadcasts for warnings in the building and company propaganda.
In a building that is already networked it could very well be cheeper then the "tradional" PA system.
In the home envirment I really think it needs to be more "sterio" like and have some form of storage on board to store the music so the server does not always need to be on.. Otherwise it boils down to what a lot of people are saying..
Nothing more then WinAmp with a remote control.
sorta, I am an MP3 Junkie... CmdrTaco has had better days.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Sorry to ask a dumb question, but --
I was wondering how you got it to work via 80211b?
The firmware was posted (finally) for the PIC16F877 controlling the whole thing. Disassembly shows much of it is regular code, but some appears to be encrypted - ie, not real code. At some point one hopes that they open this part up, but I doubt they will. One would need the configuration for the altera part as well to duplicate the whole thing, so this code, while important, is not going to put them out of business even if it weren't encoded (which could be the case - I haven't inspected it extremely closely - but the return from interrupt instruction and whole interrupt handler are valid and appear to be good code - just lots of other invalid code elsewhere, which could be encoded (not encrypted) text for the display...).
Anyway, it would become significantly more hackable if this code were opened. The TCP/IP stack is only a short leap from simple IP and TCP/IP stacks already freely available for this chip, there is plenty of code for controlling both the crystal lan chip and the mas MP3 decoder, so there is little they have to lose by opening it, except that it would give a peek into what's on the altera chip.
-Adam
You can also use your own or an old pc with an Irman and a remote you probably already have. You won't have a fancy display, but it will cost only $35. And seperate displays are available for under $100.
Can someone please explain what the point of an optical connection on an MP3 player would be? Do you really want to be able to perfectly reproduce the imperfections introduced by the compression algorithm?
It reminds me of the time when radio stations were advertising the extra quality they were giving you by switching to CDs, conveniently ignoring the fact that no matter the media, we still had to contend with the static-prone transmission medium. This is the same issue, only reversed.
"It doesn't have a fancy plastic box" says CT. How is this a benefit, I like pretty boxes!!! Even more, I, for one, am not adverse to removing a couple of screw and taking off the "pretty box" and checking out what is underneath. Come on now, would a car enthusiast buy a automobile without a hood just for easier access to the motor??? I didn't think so...
Next, and this is a bit more trivial, but the internal NIC on this thing is only 10MB. Now I know what you are thinking - that is plenty fast enough for streaming audio. Well, in that aspect you are absolutely correct; however, what if you no longer have a hub/switch that even support 10MB anymore. I have a home network that this could work with quite nicely...that is, other than the fact that I am going to dust off one of my 10/100 auto-sensing hubs just for this purpose and loose my bragging rights of having a completely switched, 100MB home network!!!
I have one word for you..."ogg"!!! Besides being a rather strange noise to make, it is also the file type of the majority of my music. Having not supported this file type may be the death of an otherwise appealing gadget for hardcore hackers!!!
And finally, to conclude my little critique, I will point to the usefulness of such a gadget. While speaker wire does have distance limitations that CAT5 far surpasses, how many of us would encounter such a limitation in our own home. At work it would be quite feasible for attenuation to have negating affects, but at home this is really a mute point. As such, what is the benefit in having hardware vs. software decoding of MP3's when the same or similar can be accomplished through a free download of Winamp...
Well, I suppose I will get back down off of my soapbox... I do enjoy seeing the Taco back to doing some stories, I just hope that he exercises a it more objectivity in the future!!!
-n2q
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
When are electronic device manufacturers going to stop making power cords with huge "wall wart" transformers?
It is becoming increasingly annoying to have to get power bars on power bars because some device (your hub, external Zip drive, speakers, etc.) takes up the space of two or more outlets.
A much smarter decision (which is used on laptops, and on some synth equipment) is to put the transformer in the middle of the power cable, with the proprietary little jack on one end and a regular two or three prong male plug on the other.
Wall warts are ugly!
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Not a bad idea for a two-way remote though, even if it isn't wireless. I have a $25 RF remote to control Winamp on my PC, and a 10m S/PDIF cable returning for the sound, but I don't get any other info, just the music.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
...as it uses a mp3-only decoder that can only do one stream at once. You need to be able to decode in software and mix streams to do a crossfade.
No chance of OGG, WMA or WAV either, for the same reasons!
If you need a pretty box, or demand optical connections to your reciever, go with the audiotron. If you want something tiny, or just want to hack at your MP3 player stereo component, this is a great way to go.
OR...if you want to run a MP3 box off of OSX, Audiotron doesn't cut it. It's kinda nice to see a desktop player with out-of-the-box OSX support.
Triv
Yes, agreed the price is a little steep. But as an impulse I bought one of these bad-boys from slimdevices.com back in September when they released their first trial run, I've got #49 off the line. I have to say it is an amazing little unit. I had it plugged in, booted, and serving MP3's from my drive array in less that 5 minutes.
Taco said it best, this is a totally hackable unit. The server software on the PC controls everything. The SliMP3 transmits all iR commands from the remote to the server for interpretation, so you can add new functions as you see fit. I've added several, such as making each number on the remote a hot-key for playlists of different genres.
If you've ever wanted one touch access for music to match your mood, this is the unit to buy.
The bright display that is also completely programmable from the server side to display whatever you want. The UI is more intelligent than you might think, and if you've got your music stored in a proper hierachy, finding what you want is a breeze. I can get to any specific song in my collection with a few keypresses. And I can get to any genre of music with a single keypress.
It is also quiet. There are no moving parts. It sits silently atop your stereo system, and the display is bright and crisp enough to be read across the room, assuming you've got good eyes.
I don't own and Audiotron or a RioReceiver, but I'm certain that both of those products could learn a few pointers from Sean Adams and the guys at slimdevices.com.
Support open source electronics. It's not often you get a piece of hardware that has an entirely open architecture and open driver/server for your perusal/hacking. No reverse-engineering is required, it's all here for you. This is an excellent precedent, and I'd like to see more devices embrace this model.
I recenlty bought an SV24. ( $250 from MWave ) A very small barebones PC that's a little larger than a toaster, but kinda noisy. (hopefully I can fix that with maybe a via c3 cpu with no cpu fan and maybe hacking in a quieter case fan) Put Debian linux on it (needs new xfree86 savage driver, or linux locks up hard upon start of x, sound works fine, I used alsa), stuffed in a TV tuner card, 1gz celeron, and dvd drive, loaded roomjuice on it (mentioned above) and some mp3s and voila, a nice little home entertainment PC. Complied mplayer on it, it plays dvd's, avi's, divx movies, mpgs, vcds, etc. Use xawtv to watch tv. (actually I use wmtv for wmaker, mplayers new tv junk wouldn't work :( ) I still have my vcr doing the channel tuning/recording though. Maybe that'll change someday when I have time to figure out a good way make it record like a vcr. Still have to get my remote that came with my tv tuner card working as well. Just haven't had the time yet. I'm currently using a 17" monitor as my viewing device, as it is bigger than my old 13" tv. :) But the SV24 has vga, svideo, and composite out, so you can use whatever. The machine also has 4 usb ports, 2 firewire (well it's technically not called that, heh), serial, paralell, I skipped the installing a floppy drive, who needs em anymore? :) Anyway it's an interesting project, my next thing I guess is to make everything better integrated somehow, so every thing can be controlled via a mouse or other pointing device somehow, and easy enough for my mom to figure out. It's almost there using "gentoo" off of freshmeat. But it would be nice to have a custom program.
Sorry a lot of the above is lot of disconnected information/thoughts, but it's hard to compose a decent post in a 60x10 box that /. gives me, I know, I should just compose everything in vim first, so sue me. :) Why don't people use big text area boxes anyway? The small ones I always annoy me, maybe if you could resize them with mozilla. That would be nice. :)
At least, not until they come out with a portable mod/it/s3m/xm/mtm/etc... player(project or not)...
I h4ve 0\\/ned j0ur SliMP3. n0w j00 w!ll l!5ten 2 br!tn3y 4ll +h3 +!m3 c0s sh3 r0x0rzzz!111111
DId anyone else see the 5000 capacitors that they installed by hand. Suprised someone didn't go postal.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I'd too would prefer they'd be made some dope-smoking hacker instead.
It would be super cool if these guys would build an amplifier/receiver with this functionality built in. An ethernet port, and a pcmcia slot to let you add your own 802.11 card would be keen. The perfect stereo component!
Is it possible to hack the firmware to have it play raw audio? Or is the output of the mpeg chip wired directly to the input of the D/A? I ask because it would be infinitely easier to add support for things like Ogg and such by simply decoding on the server and streaming the raw audio to the player. It would also allow us to do normalization, cross-fades, or whatever. It would also be nice to avoid any additional artifacts from re-encoding. Sure, it would take more bandwidth, but with 10bT there's plenty.
After all, when Hot Topic is trading on NASDAQ (HOTT), you can pretty much write 'punk' off as a profitable industry.. Much like 'grunge' and 'hippie'.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I'll buy it when it has an S-video output and can play DiVX (and mpeg) movies from my computer. 100MPs Ethernet should be fast enough to move data faster than you can play. Well, I guess DiVX isn't a real streaming format... would that present a problem? Anyway, I think devices like this are the future of living room entertainment; the next (obvious) step is video.
See any modern day pinball machine (adams family, fishtales, ect) Thats a vacuum fluorescent example
Every modern kernel (and windows) supports IPv6. I expect it of all my net connected boxes.
And with 64 times the Internet addressed to my house, I'll not need that NAT crap either.
Get with the 00's (pronounced UhOh's) and get an IPv6 MP3 player.
parle pour toi.
ANARCHIE, nom de dieu !
e.Digital Introduces VoiceNavTM, The First Spoken-Word Recognition and Navigation Interface For Portable Devices VoiceNav is now available to consumers for the first time in e.Digital's new MXP 100 portable digital music and voice recorder/player, which features hands-free navigation using spoken word commands. e.Digital also incorporates Texas Instruments' low-power TMS320C54xTM digital signal processor (DSP) into the MXP 100's design, facilitating an advanced feature set, and providing compatibility between various software and firmware components.
If you have a $5000 stereo, then presumably you can hear the difference between that and a $2000 stereo, unless you bought it for that nice warm fuzzy feeling that comes with owning extremely expensive and nifty kit. Which I can understand ;) But if you're a true audiophile, and your ears are really that good, why are you listening to mp3's on that nice system?
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
Grammer... Penguinoflight isn't doing that well either...
See http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/panasonicm p3.html
This is great (although the price sucks).
Here's the first feature I am going to implement:
I want a huge playlist (perhaps encompassing EVERY song in my collection) with a 0%-100% rating on each song. The "smart DJ" will be able to play a "shuffle/random" selection with the probability of any given song being played proportional to the song's % rating.
In other words, it will play my favorite songs more often than my less favorite songs, but it will play them randomly so I won't hear the same 10 songs over and over. And occasionally I will hear the nearly-forgotten songs in my collection (after all if they are in my collection I must like them).
It will also track a short history to make sure I never hear the same song twice within a short time span (say 30 minutes).
The next feature will be to ability to give ratings to SUB playlists so I can for instance have the "smart DJ" choose to play a 3 song "Pink Floyd" medley or to play a song immediately followed by an interesting cover version of the same song by a different artist.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
and an old one, too
:p
right here. august 25.. gee guys, on top of your game today, huh?
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
Most people seem to be forgetting about optical cable. Get a decent sound card with an optical out and run it to your receiver's optical in. The only problem here is a lack of remote control, for which other's have specified solutions. There are lots of ways to get your mp3s on your stereo, some of which will be better for different types of folks, but if you're going to lay an audio cable, do yourself a favour and use an optical one (if your system will support it)!
www.clarke.ca