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Linux HiFi: The Sonos Digital Music System
TractorJector writes "Mad Penguin published a 5 page review of the Sonos Digital Music System, a wireless music distribution system built on Linux. According to the site, you can use a single remote to control up to 32 "zones" (locations throughout your house where the receivers are placed). The interface is intuitive and well done for such a compact device. According to the review, it's extremely simple to setup as well."
I ended up just putting a computer with some decent speakers in each room I wanted music and accessing my music files over my existing network.
One thing in Sonos' favor is that their system is a lot more consumer-accessible.
Very neat.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
i wonder if they will get sued for apple, or got the proper rights for that clickwheel
Looks like a very cool system - well outside my price range (and with 3 small children, outside of my "what can my heart stand when the little buggers touch the expensive equipment").
My only question is on the school wheel interface. My understanding is that Apple had purchased the rights to use the patents to the scroll wheel touchpad system for their technologies (I don't recall the actual patent holder). Does this mean that Sony's scroll wheel is not touch pad based (could be a physical wheel and *not* violate the patent, I guess), or did they also get a piece of the patent license somehow?
Just curious.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I could buy a cheapo $299 Dell for each bedroom, network them wirelessly to a huge 300GB drive and have far more functionality than this setup. Am I wrong?
The biggest need I have in this realm is for a UPnP media player that runs under linux and can play streams from a Windows server. I'd be happy with one that only supports audio, but so far no dice. I'd like to interface with Real's Rhapsody from a Linux box.
There seem to be plenty of UPnP servers being developed under Linux, but no clients.
Are there proprietary codec issues that are hindering this?
My dad got the Sonos a couple of months ago, and I saw it in action last weekend. It's really cool stuff and well implemented.
The big selling point for him was being able to have all the "zones" synchronously play the same song in every room. None of the other solutions he looked at were able to do that.
As far as I remember, the scrool wheel doesn't move- it's touch based, like on the recent iPods.
I just wish I had the money to buy one for myself...
Couldn't they lower the price a little bit by selling a version of the box to integrate with your existing stereo. Just a receiver box with a RCA and digital output jack on the back. For a lot of applications I would image people already have the amp covered and don't need to spend the extra money on a part of the system that isn't going to get used.
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Hmmm, cool looking product but from looking at the last page of the article, the reviewer rates the ease of setup on WindowsXP 10/10 but gives the ease of linux setup as a measly 2/10.
The reviewer said he had to ask the Sonos community (maybe a web forum?) for help getting it to work under Suse. Apparantly you need to run Samba for the Sonos controller to be able to access the music and gave the reviewer enough trouble that he writes:
"For Linux wizards, this is probably just another opportunity to play and have fun, but for me it was some serious work, and I would not have been able to do it but for the graciousness of the Sonos community. "
It seems that they haven't put a lot of polish on the linux support for the server end yet. I'm wondering why is there no NFS support which should do away with needing Samba... I have my entire music collection on an NFS share, and I'd expect any linux client to simply mount it over the network and away we go.
Should we be giving much credit to a product just because it runs linux if it's really that difficult to make it play nicely with existing linux networks?