Slashdot Mirror
MP3beamer Released
An anonymous reader writes "MP3tunes, Michael Robertson's new music venture, has released a snazzy linux music appliance called MP3beamer. The $399 box auto-rips CDs and imports MP3s and then connects to iTunes, Java devices, media receivers, web devices even WinCE units with handy feature to "sync" songs from server to remote machine for offline playback not just streaming - see screenshots. Last time Robertson launched something with "Beam" in the name it led to avalanche of lawsuits and more then $150MM in legal payments with BeamIt from the old MP3.com." It'd be excellent to get a review of one of these machines; looks like a good one.
EVEN BETTER! It appears they are selling just the software for $70 to let you use your own machine as the "beamer" hardware. OS included!!
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
Reminds me of Tivo for the musically inclined. Consumers do seem to like black boxes, as long as they work right the first time. I'd look at this for myself - it would be nice to have a music only drive and dedicate one machine for that task. Four hundred is a decent price point as well.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
Only MP3 Beamer I can think of is the iPod for the BMW.
Interesting, none-the-less.
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Picturing Dr. Evil, giggling and saying "Unless you give us 150 Million Million dollars!!! Mwahahaha etc. etc."
Still, looks like a nice box.
--
Does MSN censor search results?
Having your music on one box might be appealing to some - heck, it is to me. Part os it is I dont want to keep a 550 watt machine going solely got music streaming - it does make a dent in your electric bill. It appears to be pretty portable too - if the functionality is as expected this will be a hot seller IMO.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
...you can get a Mac Mini to do just about all that and more. I have mine hooked up to my TV doing most of what this does, as well as playing games, showing slideshows, and ripping and playing DVDs.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
But according to Napster, iTunes can cost you 10,000$!!
A machine you can put on autopirate and it works! A new generation of AI!
My little site.
This product borrows heavily from the OSS Slimserver product, which is primarily developed for the Squeezebox and SliMP3 by http://www.slimdevices.com/Slim Devices.
If you check out the site, they're offering the software only for around $70 which makes it a more viable solution for many of us unwilling to buy a box for $400.
The only box that has to be running Linux is the main beamer, so you could easily work this right into an existing home M$ network.
It even looks like you can beam your collection remotely to work.
Also, different users can play different tunes at the same time.
It seems pretty cool and useful at first glance.
I use my roomates machine to stream and store all of my music. He doesn't notice and it cost me no money.
Did I mention that he's not very computer literate?
Heck, with Hymn they could even add support for iTMS files, outside of the US anyways. Not that it matters. If I wanted to change portable players I'd just find one that played unprotected AAC and run my music through Hymn myself. But there don't seem to be any options out there!
Sure the software is available, but it doesn't set itself up. If a non-/.'er wanted to set this up they'd either have to spend a large amount of time learning linux and such, or pay a geek quite a bit of cash to make it work.
So why can't I do this with my existing machine and maybe an additional hard disk for storage? Oh wait, I already do!
In other words, Slashdot editors want a free one to play with.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
As the other poster indicated, it does run a P4-derived Celeron [as a sidenote, isn't it about time to retire the product name Celeron? It has caused confusion since the days of the Celeron 300a]. Personally I'd rather it ran a low-power processor, such as a Pentium M or Powerstep processor, or even the via processors (formerly Cyrix). A 2.4Ghz Celeron is a ridiculous power hog for something that plays MP3s. Hell I put together a fully capable full-video media player machine with a 2.4Ghz Celeron.
A while back I noticed that iTunes has the ability to automatically rip a CD when it's put in the drive. And when it's done the CD can be automatically ejected. I'm not certain but I suspect that combined with some Applescript and a CD jukebox could be a frightenly effective combination. How much you wanna bet that programmers at Apple have already done it for themselves?
In the product FAQ, they mention an MP3Beamer Sync component that automatically syncs your iTunes collection with your MP3Beamer collection. I'm curious how they pulled this off. Does the iTunes Sharing protocol (DAAP) support file upload? Or are they pushing the music in some other way?
Do any of the moderators actually read the fucking article first?
The CPU is a 2.4Ghz Celeron. It's not an expensive P4.
$150 in M&Ms would not be so bad. If only my Ex-wife had only asked for that!
Not that I don't agree with you, but you do realize that the specs for a power supply list how much power it _can_ supply, not how much it _does_ supply at any given point?
For example, the server that I use for development, storage, MP3, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, SMB, etc is an AMD 2600 with two (2) 200GB 7200 RPM drives and 1 GB RAM.
Even though it has a 400W power supply, I've measured that it uses 140W.
Regardless, your point still stands as the server costs about $15 / mo to run.
Just pay a kid 10 cents per CD to drop them in the mp3beamer for you. Like Robertson himself did.
Thanks for this link. I did measure various components of my homebrew PC, but never thought of using a commercial outlet meter on it. I need to check that out. No matter what, I got a 3.0 GHz CPU and 9 fans - I know I'm leaking fuel out of it!
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
While it is actually a Celeron, note this benchmark of CPUs encoding MP3s.
MP3tunes purchase and loading MP3s to MP3beamer - 10:18 mins
Mpeg Low-Res - 43.5MB
Mpeg High-Res - 60 MB
iTunes streaming, Home Stereo use - 10:39 mins
Mpeg Low-Res - 40MB
Mpeg High-Res - 55MB
iTunes syncing, iPod loading, PDA playback - 11:30 mins
Mpeg Low-Res- 39MB
Mpeg High-Res - 49MB
If you are worried about the electric bill, build a mini-itx based system. They can be ran off of a 60 watt power supply (some require 90) and would make a great dedicated music server. They are not powerfull enough to worry about your electric bill.....and some can be nearly silent (no fans) except for hd and cd noise.
Stop signs are only Suggestions
That post was unrightfully marked flamebait. Any one who posts their negative opinion on slashdot is considered a flamer, and that's simply due to the (f)laws of civil discourse.
But he has a point, its 400 dollars for something you can write software to do.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
WMLS11B is a standard UPnP client. The TwonkyVision Media Server works just great to serve MP3s to my WMLS11B from linux.
Easy answer: check out Slim Devices Squeezebox. Here's how it addresses your needs:
1. The box is barely wider or taller than the display, and it's not very deep, either.
2. The output is analog or digital stereo, not 5.1 or 7.1, but it doesn't funnel video anyway so there's no need for surround sound support (unless there's 5.1 and 7.1 non-movie audio out there?)
3. You can use the remote and the surprisingly large and bright screen to configure your player, search through your music, build playlists, adjust the volume, change the screensaver, pull up internet radio streams, play pacman and tetris...okay, those last two might be gratuitous.
4. You can use any computer on your network to change the playlist on and control all aspects of every player you have. Not only can you start Ben Folds and Beastie Boys playing on two different players from a computer in another room (or over the internet), you can also sync them so that they both play the same music AT THE SAME TIME in both rooms.
I highly recommend the wired version, because it's cheap, in stock, and reliable as hell.