After sticking staunchly to real CDs for home listening, I finally succumbed and expanded my terabyte house into the digital audio server domain. In the end, it was audiophile Mark Schlack from TechTarget who won me over - if digital audio is good enough for him, then it ought to be good enough for me!

Although both of my TiVos can browse and play mp3 files, they require the television to be on and a special server running on a PC (or so I thought, more on that later). It was critical that any digital music solution be directly browsable and searchable using a remote control, since the kids perk up whenever they hear the big tube on our Sony TV burp to life.

Although there are a good many home music players available, two immediately rose above the rest: the Slim Devices Squeezebox, and the Roku SoundBridge M1001. Both are somewhat similar in that they are designed to connect to a home network and browse and play digital music in a variety of formats to an audio receiver. I rejected out of hand all those devices that lacked their own display, sadly including Apple’s intriguing AirPort Express with Air Tunes.

My research quickly revealed that the Squeezebox was the audiophile-preferred solution with its fancy Burr-Brown digital audio converters, while the SoundBridge was the hackers choice with its open interfaces and wider server compatibility. It was widely claimed that only the Squeezebox supported lossless codecs, but I found that this was not the case - although FLAC must be transcoded, the SoundBridge does support ALAC and even WAV for high quality audio. The difference in DACs made no difference to me, since I would be using a digital (S/PDIF) connection to bypass the SoundBridge’s DAC in favor of the one in my Denon receiver.

In the end, the flexible SoundBridge won me over with its wide range of interfaces. It can browse and stream an iTunes library directly, since Roku licensed Apple’s DAAP API. There are a variety of other DAAP servers that can use, too, including Slim Devices Slimserver! But I settled on the open source Firefly (nee mt-daapd) server, since it was full featured, and lightweight enough to run on an embedded NAS server like the Linksys NSLU2, which I intended to add in short order. The SoundBridge also has an open API and telnet interface!

Making my choice even sweeter, at $127, the SoundBridge was half the price of the Squeezebox, too! I placed my order, and thenerds.net delivered it the very next day, even though I chose ground shipping!

The SoundBridge is amazing! It does exactly what I wanted, letting me listen to the tunes stored on my wife’s and my laptop as well as my home PC server without any configuration required. Once I discovered that you can quickly move from letter to letter with the right and left buttons, locating the right song from our 7800-tune collection could not be easier either.

The one major letdown that I had is that Apple will not allow any other hardware, even under license, to play the protected m4p files purchased from iTunes. Although most of my music is ripped from CD, I have got a few dozen iTunes purchased songs. There is a way to crack that DRM protection on these files, but it galls me to have to hack them open just to listen to them!

All in all, I’m very pleased with my new digital music solution at home. I’m seriously considering buying Roku’s SoundBridge Radio, which would let me wirelessly browse and play music anywhere within range of my access point. And I did add that home server - more on this next time.

Yeah, I’m a TiVo believer. This thing liberates me from thinking about television shows and schedules - I live my life and watch what I want when I want to instead of thinking “gosh, I better get home Wednesday night or I’ll miss Lost!”

I finally jumped on the Series 3 TiVo in June when they offered a $200 rebate. This is the ultimate TiVo unit - dual tuner, cable and antenna HD, CableCards, nifty OLED display, THX certified… It’s simply to die for. Watching Jon Lester return to the Red Sox last night in 1080i with surround sound was a real treat (once I located the non-blackout channel!) Sadly there’s much less over-the-air HD content here in Ohio than there was in Massachusetts - I’m only picking up PBS, if you can believe that! At least my cable company offers 5 networks (if you count MyNothingTV and CW) and two ESPN channels!

Well, today TiVo released the TiVo HD. My college buddy, Megazone (yes, that’s his real name), released a full review of the unit, and it looks to be a keeper at $299. It still has an eSATA port for adding storage, and rumor has it TiVo will offer a 1 TB RAID array at Best Buy soon. A TiVo marketing guy interviewed at Engadget also slipped in that TiVoToGo will soon be enabled for both the original Series 3 and the new HD.

I still like my plush Series 3 (which came out at $406 after rebate), but if you’ve been waiting to pick up a TiVo, wait no longer. This thing is everything you were looking for!

Unless you have Comcast, that is. They’ll be releasing a software-only TiVo on their OCAP boxes soon that’ll cost you zilch…

Or unless you have SDV cable (which is rare).

Hu Yoshida speculated in his blog that most folks would rather outsource their home media storage than keep terabytes of storage in their home. Sure, he was speaking for HDS, which has no home storage ambitions, but I respect him and can understand his point. I already outsource my personal email because I can get better features, access, and reliability that way. But there’s no way I would outsource my media, and this is the real storage king in my multi-terabyte home.

Back in the 1990’s, I marveled at the fact that every PC I bought had more storage than all others I had ever owned, combined. But then came the Nomad Jukebox and its hard drive hack and suddenly my portable personal music player had more storage than everything I owned. My AT&TiVo easily eclipsed that, especially once I added a second drive. And the majority of the 320 GB in my home PC is used for media files too. My new HD TiVo promises to soon become the first terabyte-in-a-box computer in my house.

Continue Reading »