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Embedded Linux In Onkyo's Home Music Server
IrateSurf writes "ExtremeTech has a story about a new use of embedded Linux from Onkyo, which runs a home music server. Their NAS-2.3 has a CD-player as well as an 80GB hard drive for storing music and streaming it to other players on the an Ethernet network. Also check out the web site for the NAS-2.3."
If only they would make it record radio, too ...
They must be rich if they can afford to have 80gigs worth of legal copies of their music...
if each album takes 80megs about.. then the hd can hold 1000 albums... 1000 albums at 20$ an album is 20,000$ !
Who can afford to spend that much on music?
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
The only reason I keep my Windows partition is so I can mount it like the bitch that it is.
"If only they would make it record radio, too ..."
See archos for devices that record raido directly into mp3. They have a hard drive and a smart media device that does that i beleive. Plus they keep the last 30 seconds of audio in memory in case the song you want has already started you can still get the begining.
-Foxxz
mod this flamebait if you must but I gotta ask, what does it really matter what OS it's running?
It could run TRS-DOS for all I care as long as it gets the job done efficiently.
Legal mp3's don't have to come off a $20 CD.
Check acidplanet.com mp3.com mp3.com.au spinwarp.com etc etc etc
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
Onkyo (www.onkyousa.com) is one of the better-known Japanese manufacturers of home theater gear. Recently, the company has begun building audio and home theater equipment with built-in Ethernet ports, rather than some proprietary connectivity scheme. PC Magazine wrote about one of Onkyo's product, the NC500 Net-Tune Receiver. However, the Net-Tune receiver is perhaps the least interesting of the products, offering the now-familiar paradigm -- the digital receiver that can route music from your PC to your home audio system. The NC500 does have a stereo amplifier, but is otherwise similar to products from Turtle Beach, Sonic Blue and others. However, Onkyo is bringing Ethernet capability to a full-fledged, Dolby Digital/DTS 7.1 receiver in it's TX-NR900, THX-Select certified home theater receiver. The TX-NR900 offers 110 watts RMS into 7 channels, supports all the major surround sound standards and can act as a Net-Tune client, allowing you to pipe the digital music from your PC directly to your home theater rack. In addition to the usual array of input and output ports is a standard, 10 megabit Ethernet port.
That's pretty cool, but that's not all. Onkyo also sells a line of high-end gear targeted towards custom installations under its Integra brand. Onkyo offers products similar to the NC500 and TX-NR900, but with additional capabilities. What's most interesting, though, is the Integra NAS-2.3 Net-Tune Server.
At first blush, the NAS-2.3 seems like a CD player, but it also has an embedded 80GB hard drive. So now it appears to be like any number of digital music players on the scene. But the NAS-2.3 also has a 10/100 Ethernet port, and is capable of acting as a music server to a network of Net-Tune devices. Running on the Integra product is an embedded Linux operating system, which acts as the server software.
The NAS-2.3 can support up to 12 simultaneous streams to Net-Tune receivers or other clients. You can have different tracks playing in multiple rooms, move music to a PC, display a playlist on most types of displays (the NAS-2.3 has VGA, S-Video and composite video outputs) and can even connect up to CDDB to download track information on various CDs.
One other interesting aspect of the NAS-2.3 is the availability of an empty drive sled inside the box, allowing users or installers to add additional hard drive space. You can't use a standard, PC-formatted hard drive, according to Eric Harper, Integra's Custom Installation and Product Manager. The formatting is somewhat different, but a knowledgeable user or installer should be able to add another drive to the server.
So if you don't want the headache of building your own music server from a PC, then the NAS-2.3 can integrate into your home Ethernet network, co-existing quite well with your PC systems. It's an intriguing idea that embraces the PC network, rather than trying to remain isolated.
NNY News with a twist of lime.
I'd like one to work more like a radio Tivo. Say I always listen to Neal Boortz and Sean Hanity, then maybe the machine will sugest old Rush. Or if I always listen to the new rock station, maybe save the new rock show (or what ever the call radio segments) on a different station. Of cource without any real listings of radio shows, like a radio TV Guide, all that may be asking to much...
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
There's the display to, they want to make it look nice among the other stereo devices, and finally take a look at the back panel. They use virtually all the space.
It mentions that files must be in mp3 or pcm format. Now alot of my music is actually in ogg. First, if it's embeded linux, will there be a means by which we can install other codecs? (say ssh or such.) Second, will there be a supplied means to upgrade the hard drive? (I know you might not need 80gigs for your legal collection but my illegal collections already over that. by far.)
I do security
why do they have to make these so big??
1. space for all the connections in the back
2. power amp cooling. Driving serious power to multiple large speakers takes power. That heat needs to be dissipated.
3. It looks better
But recording off the radio could mean the end of the music industry as we know it!!
_nfotxn
I love the ease of CD's on an HD, but as a semi-audiophile I want something that does uncompressed audio.
The last unit from Integra (Made into an Onkyo brand) also offered digital out but only for MP3s. If you played PCM the digital out turned off! Anyone know if this unit does the same thing?
AFAIK iMerge UK is the only company that has given RIAA the finger and offers PCM digital out, oh, and their players are much cooler but also more expensive.
I would question the market viability of a device designed to copy songs from the radio. When you copy a CD that you bought and paid for, you are buying the material on the CD. You are purchasing a copy. When you hear a song on the radio, you are hearing performance of the song. An artist/record company makes money for every copy and performance made. If you buy a CD and copy it (assuming that you don't share it or anything) just to listen to it on a device such as this, you aren't taking any more than what you paid for. But if you copy from the radio, you are. In fact this was the basis for the case against radio stations streaming broadcasts over the internet, because temporary copies of songs were made on the user's hard drive therefore making it a copy. Most of you have probablly heard of that case. Most radio stations have ceased to do so because of this, and are fighting it as well. I'm not trying to defend the RIAA in any way. However, a device that would facilitate copying of music from the radio would definitely come under serious fire from the RIAA, IMHO.
--
Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see ethernet as one of the input sources. I have that 1400 legal MP3s ripped from my CDs--I'm not sure I want to go thru that again.
Sorry for the subject line, but that's what I think whenever I see one of these embedded Linux stories--"For all I care it's powered by gerbils running in exercise wheels." Am I happy to see Linux get a little positive press? Sure, but let's not read more into this than it deserves. The rest of the world won't know this thing has "Linux Inside", nor will they care. The Linux crowd should be focused on the real battleground, the desktop, and derailing MS's monopoly.
Does anyone care what Yoko Ono does?
Oh, ONKYO. Sorry...
No. In fact, there is a product on the market that can stream music in three different wireless paths, 802.11b, 802.11g and bluetooth, along with gigabit ethernet. The system uses an open source operating system, you can address it via http, ssh, X11 or you can roll your own access system, its portable, has a fold-out LCD screen and is so thin, it can fit under a typical AV receiver. You can read more about it here.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
erm, mebbe because most stereo equipment is manufactured at 19" and they want to make it an actual audio appliance?
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Of all the "music server" products i've seen on the market, i've yet to see one that has redundant hard drives. Maybe these things haven't been on the market long enough, but eventually the hard drives in these devices will fail, and when they do, there are going to be some very pissed off consumers out there.
Until recently, audio gear manufacturers never had to worry about the storage media. When you bought the music, you bought a hard copy of that media (cd, record, tape...etc). I understand that these devices still require you to purchase the "hard copy" of the music, but do you want to re-rip 500 CDs just because your hard drive went clunk-clunk?
-ted
A rendezvous enabled wireless device that ties into my music collection (yes, iTunes). The reality of the situation is, if Apple doesn't release it, we won't see it for at least a year. Well, depending on how the HomePod is made, maybe it could incorporate rendezvous...
:)
Anyone have any home brew devices in the works? Maybe now's the time to start
And the client product, which does have an amplifier (although at only 15W a channel, and only two channels), is significantly smaller. Less than half the size...
Of course half the size in the wrong dimension if you want to stack it with your other audio components...
except the Onkyo doesn't have an amplifier
From the extremetech review:
"The TX-NR900 offers 110 watts RMS into 7 channels"
Sounds like an amp to me.
This is nothing more than a simple "I agree" . I think that many times we get carried away with trying to "protect" rights we've never had, like taping the radio, which may have been tolerated in the past, we're now realizing is quite illegal, as you pointed out quite well in distinguishing it as a performance. I think a more rational approach such as yours is needed to make sure that we do get our digital media however we want.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Onkyo is smart for using Linux. Nearly all the Pacific Rim (Sony, Pioneer, Panasonic, ect.) manufacturers are testing it or are ready to deploy because they don't need to pay out royalties per unit, can share innovations with each other, and can share data with each other's units over 100Mb Ethernet or 802.11x or whatever. The most important thing to remember is they don't need to spend huge amounts on R&D. Linux will become the Linga Franca of consumer electronics, unless Microsoft buys one of the big players and twists everyone's arm to go along. Maybe not even then, as the long term gains are too big. And most Japanese electronics manufacturers are thinking very long term.
And yes these babies are BIG! And HEAVY! At 110 RMS per CH. Thats 660 Watts out, all discrete. No output IC's. Not to mentions pre amp and video switching. Schwweett.
Inputs:
Audio and AV Inputs - 3/6
HDTV-Ready Component Video Input/Output - 2/1
Front-Panel Video Input (with S-Video) - Yes
S-Video Compatible Jacks Input/Output - 6/3
Digital Inputs:
5 Optical (1 Front Panel), 3 Coaxial
Digital Output - 2 Optical Amp In
RS-232 Control Port
IR In/Out - 1/1
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
Integra + Onkyo, please market this in the UK!
:-)
At last a networked digital audio recording and storage device that actually looks like a proper piece of hifi gear for the rack in the lounge.
While there are several units along these lines on the market now, they haven't really respected the basic ergonomic and stylistic standards for hifi separates in the modern home until now. This product seems to be the closest so far --- I want one, purchaseable here with a UK warranty!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
http://www.net-tune.net
From the Onkyo FAQ:
While WAV, WMA, MP3 are supported formats, there are many variations of these. Please check that the bitrates used are compatible and if certain files will not play back, check the following: * The file must not be saved in a system folder, such as C:\Windows or C:\WINNT. * WMA file contains Digital Rights Management (DRM) which prevents reproduction on other devices. * The WAV file is not in RIFFWAVE format or is corrupt. Format Bitrate Sampling Frequency WAV(PCM) ---- 32k/44.1k/48kHz MP3 All 32k/44.1k/48kHz WMA 32/36/40/44/48/64/80/96/128/160/192bps 32k/44.1k/48kHz
Further, it uses DHCP to get an IP address. And needs ports 60096,60097. But that is of course all useless information until I actually find one of these machines.
The Integra is really a rebadged Imerge product, who are based in Cambridge. It is known as the SoundServer S2000 - http://www.imerge.co.uk/products/improductshtml/ip main.html
Of course, there may be some functional difference, but otherwise they look identical. Costs £1599 - AS this is Slashdot, I bet most people would just build their own audio server PC and slap in a nice sound card (M-Audio Delta 410 audio card offers slightly better specification) and with some interesting software, you could have a relatively cheap multi-room audio server which supports say, OGG Vorbis, APE, SHN, etc.
I don't understand. You want to rip cds on a portable CD/mp3 player? Do you have a hard drive on your CD/mp3 player? I don't think I've ever seen one of those. Please provide a url.
Well, I've got an Archos Recorder. I'm not sure if by "CD/mp3" player you mean "a CD player that plays MP3s", or if you mean "CD or MP3 player". If the latter, the Archos Recorder is a hard-drive based MP3 player (18 GB). It also records to MP3 format at up to 160kps.
By connecting a CD player's audio out to the Recorder audio in, I could in theory rip directly onto the Archos. I've never done this, and probably won't, as I'd have to manually enter song names, which is tedious, and as I like to rip CDs at a somewhat higher (~ 192kbps) quality. On the othr hand, the Recorder also contains a built-in microphone, so it can be useful for voice recording.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
It doesn't matter to me in the least. Onkyo makes some of the shittiest components I've ever used. I had a CD changer fail within 3 years, an amp fail within 5 years, and the sound quality coming out of even their "high end" models sucks ass. Onkyo could be running a full graphical interface of OSX, and I still wouldn't buy another one of their products. They make Sony look good by comparison.
Onkyo, high end? Maybe not now, because they're always the el-cheapo brand that the drones at Circuit City are always pushing. The few Onkyo components I've owned have all been bottom of the barrel when it comes to quality.
Agreed. Additionally, I would like to see Tivo come out with its own device - a Tivo with a CD drive that could rip tracks itself and present them via the normal Tivo menu.
In addition, a 'Treat as audio'-type option could inform Tivo that certain TV recordings should be treated as audio tracks, not TV broadcasts. That covers the case where digital cable supplies a lot of radio stations.
I like Tivo's interface, and would be interested to see them move out slightly beyond their current TV-only remit.
Cheers,
Ian
I know a guy from college who worked at a *LIBRARY*. He was about 22 years old and had well over a thousand CDs.
if your Canadian, you can LEGALLY copy Audio CDs. Your CDR blanks have a tax that goes DIRECTLY to some RIAA-whore group -- in exchange, you can copy any CD you please for yourself...
so, go on down to the library with your burner and have at it.
Outside of the integrated amp weighing a ton, there's another reason. If you listen to the 'audiophiles' out there, one of the things that they rave about is 'build quality'. 99% of the time, what they mean by that is 'weight'. "Feels cheeply made" is a complaint about a lot of 'low-fi' and 'mid-fi' gear (low and mid-fi gear is defined as equipment one or more steps down (usually in price) from the gear you currently own (or the gear you're currently lusting for)).
There do exist good, quality, peices of equipment that produce music wonderfully. Trust your ears over your other senses (unless you're looking at video gear. At which point your eyes should only see 2 things: the picture and the price. People can be conned into wasting a lot of green on video gear.)
Zapman
What the article doesn't mention, but you can find by digging around for screenshots, is that the back panel has not only ethernet outputs, but a VGA, USB and modem connections.
Dunno how useful the modem would be, but it sounds like you could probably hook-up a USB keyboard and monitor, and get a shell on this device.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
* Buy used CDs from Rasputin's Records, just make sure they're fairly new and in good shape. ....profit! Well, have lots of CDs, anyway. That's how I made my CD collection. Now, everything has been ripped to mp3 and the original CDs are in a box in storage. I got tired of having them get scratched/stolen/lost.
* Go to The Wherehouse
* Take advantage of old policy and manager that your brother sells pot to and exchange used CDs that suck for new CDs that you want.
The Wherehouse also had a policy of accepting any coupon from other stores. One summer we found a big pile of "3 free movie rental" coupons.
I don't think that I left the house all freekin summer, and boy, did we see a lot of crappy movies.
These countless manufacturers making home audio MP3 devices with integrated hard drives are missing the point: you want a single point of storage in your house for MP3's, or you are going to have chaos.
Networks are not just for web-browsing. They're also for sharing files, like those MP3's. And if you're going to have them somewhere, you might as well have them on your PC where:
(1) You can rip with that expensive Athlon or PPC processor using LAME
(2) There exist myriad MP3 control tools like id3tool and mp3gain
(3) Your portable MP3 player hooks up
(4) You may be downloading files from mp3.com or other places
(5) [Important] You have a chance of keeping the hard drive and fan whines away from your audio equipment
Thus, you want the home audio component you buy to simply get its music off the network. Audiotron and SLiMP3 do just that, which makes them the only reasonable such devices.
Between them, I prefer the Audiotron because it has digital output, which means I can use the expensive DAC in my receiver rather than the cheap one in the unit. The SLiMP3 is impressively flexible, though!
Will I have access to source/documentation to customize this linux?
If not, I think this kind of item would be frustrating as I am likely to end up with a dream of doing something totally different with this embedded computer...
You know, some networked remote control for it for instance... arg... must... stop... thinking!
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).