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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.
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."
$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?
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?