Review: SliMP3

Frequent readers of Slashdot know that I'm an MP3 junkie. Hell, even casual readers probably know that at this point. This week I review another MP3 player, Slim Device's small wonder, SliMP3. And this $269 is really worth a good look.

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.

Comments

I must be missing something

[kilgore_47]

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.

Re:I must be missing something

[bartle]

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.

If your goal is to save money or you live in a single room abode, you certainly have a valid point. But if neither of those points apply to you, this product has some very cool potential.

The first issue is audio quality. The ideal is to have a digital amp and stream in your mp3s without any analog distortion. This box lacks a digital out so it isn't optimal, but it is still a lot nicer than running analog cables from another room.

The other issue is to provide a complete multiple room audio solution, this is where I suspect this device could really shine. The ideal is to have multiple audio devices in multiple rooms (computer room, living room, the garage perhaps) and be able to play seperate audio selections in each one from a central server. In addition to that, be able to "move" an audio stream from one room to another so the music relocates itself to where you are. There is a lot of cool potential with having an audio setup that works like this, playing music is only the beginning.

Of course, there really isn't any affordable audio solution that does all this. That's why this device is so intriguing, it can be hacked into doing some fairly sophisticated things. There's still a long ways to go, but these devices are very promising and very cool.

Re:I must be missing something

[easter1916]

Salut à toi EX Punk anarchiste devenu nouveau mouton conformiste...

You don't honestly think that there's any difference between an anarchist punk and a conformist sheep, do you? Punk may have been non-conformist in the 70's, now it's just another fashion.

Re:I must be missing something

[adolf]

I must be missing something, too:

1. Audio cable runs can only be so long with out degradation of signal. Cat5 has longer run length.

Wrong. 100MHz ethernet over Cat5 tops out at, what, ~100 meters? Analog audio can go for hundreds of miles. The local loop for my telephone here is 25 miles big.

The trick? Balanced signals. For the price of this box, one can have balanced line drivers for every room in the house, which can consist of as little as an op amp, or a transformer, or a somewhat more-expensive pre-fab box. In my line of work, I've used -lots- of several-hundred-foot runs of audio cable, and a few thousand foot runs in places like schools and factories. Never a problem, as long as it's balanced... better audio equipment includes balanced IO out of the box, anyhow.

As for the rest of your claims and queries:

There probably is a Web interface for Winamp, somewhere in the world. However, why do you care?

You're worried about it being operated by people that don't need to be messing around on a computer. But, whatever the case, if not winamp, there's a thousand other players which -do- have some manner of intregration with http.

The remote is a nice touch. And if you'd studied your X10 popups like a good boy, you'd see bit of kit they sell which has remote, expressly intended for controlling an MP3-playing computer with, say, Winamp running on it. If you speak unix, you might also look at the LIRC project for remote control.

And, it's vastly easier to install audio wiring to multiple points than computer networks. No need for a hub, or expensive termination tools - wirenuts, solder, or crimp-on splices from the telco industry are the order of the day. It doesn't get much more simple. If you're running things balanced, Cat5 will work fine for wire, though I prefer Belden 2200. It's cheap, stranded, a little heavier-guage than cat5, shielded, and can withstand a lot of abuse during installation (as opposed to Cat5, which will break if you look at it funny).

That all said, >$250 for a device which can only play MP3s stored elsewhere, over a network, seems silly to me. Especially when it doesn't even match the rest of the stereo - did you even read the review? It's the size of a car stereo faceplate, but a little thicker, with a bare circuit board on the back. Not my idea of a finished, quality audio component.

20,000 track listing

[mESSDan]

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.

Re:20,000 track listing

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, see, I totally disagree with you, and here's why:

I *properly* tag all my files that I rip for trading with the full song and album names in ID2.3 format, including year of release that none of the goddamn CDDB or FreeDBs ever include. Therefore, if you want to rename the tracks to whatever scheme you like (and I really don't think your scheme qualifies as "proper," it's just the way YOU like it) there are a number of utilities that will allow you to do that. And because ID2.3 handles the full names, you won't have to worry about anything getting cut off and looking stupid in your player's display.

OTOH, if you're like me and keep albums together in seperate directories and only want TrackNum_SongName, you can keep it the way I uploaded it and be assured that when you look at the display in your fave player, all the info will be there.

I also don't have loooooong filenames on my Mac, so they'll all get truncated anyway. When I d/l tagged files, I can rename them to fit the limits of my OS.

Do you stick all your MP3s in a single directory? I don't.

Personally I think that super long filenames are stupid. But then you hate ID tags, so we're at an impass here :) But I'll go with the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 FAQ: tag yer damn files for trading and let the end user decide what he wants to do woth them after.

Empeg/SonicBlue/Rio Receiver

[dschuetz]

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... :)

optical connection on MP3 device?

[Ill_Omen]

...or demand optical connections to your reciever...

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.

All very nice but ...

[Greedo]

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!

A $5000 stereo and you listen to mp3's on it?

[bythescruff]

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?