-------------------- To: friends Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 05:11:34 EST From: Douglas Alan Subject: Dell Digital Audio Receiver -------------------- I just got a new toy that I thought you might want to hear about. It's called the "Dell Digital Audio Receiver" (henceforth herein refered to as the "DDAR"). It's an mp3 and wma player that grabs the files it plays over a network from your PC. It has a 10 watt per channel amp, so you can connect speakers directly to it, and it has RCA's out, so you can plug it in to your stereo. It can be plugged into either an ethernet or into an HPNA network. I am using mine at my apartment using the HPNA network mode. (HPNA is basically a 10 mb/s ethernet that runs on your standard phone wires, but it must be modulated into RF or something because it doesn't interfere with using the phones). Dell sells it, but it's made by Sonic Blue, who used to be S3, who used to be Diamond Multimedia. Sonic Blue also makes their own version of it called the "Rio Receiver". Cost: $320, bundled with an HPNA PCI card for your PC. This thing is really cool and fun to use, and the audio filelity is good, but unfortunately the software is still of beta test quality even though they are selling it for good money. There are a number of annoying bugs and some essential features are currently missing. The DDAR grabs its firmware (actually, I think its "firmware" is Linux) over the network when you turn it on, so in theory, all the problems might be fixed in the next release of the software, but currently there seems to be no support at all for the DDAR on Dell's web site, so I'm not filled with a huge warm and fuzzy feeling about this. To use the DDAR, you first install special software on your PC that catalogs your music files and knows how to talk to the DDAR. You then plug the DDAR into your home network and to your stereo or speakers, and it fetches the music catalog from the computer. The DDAR has an LCD display, some buttons and a knob. Using the knob, you can scroll through your music by song name, artist name, album name, or playlist name. You can tell it to play an individual song, or all of the songs by an artist or on an album. Unfortunately, it's not quite as smart as one might like. Most signicantly, I think, is that you can't just tell your computer to use the DDAR as its standard audio output. This means that you can't control the DDAR from your computer, using MusicMatch Jukebox, for instance, or any other program. You have to control the DDAR from its own LCD console or from its remote control. This also means that you can't listen to streaming internet music, although the manual claims that this limitation will be fixed in a future release of the software. You can tell the DDAR to play an individual song, and this works without flaw. You can also tell it to play all the songs on a album or all the songs by a given artist, but you have only two choices on how it will do this. It will either play them in a random order or it will play them in alphabetical order. And when it plays them in alphabetical order, it uses the track tags, not the filenames, so even if you've gone to pains to make sure that your tracks sort alphabetically in the right track order, the DDAR ignores this. The DDAR *does* understand playlists, and its cataloging software will automatically find playlists in MusicMatch's or RealJukebox's playlist directories, so you can use playlists to make the DDAR play albums in the correct track order if you are willing to put in the time and effort to make playlists. Of course, doing so is something of a pain. I typically use MusicMatch Jukebox on my computer, and with it I have no need to make playlists in order to play albums in the correct track order because MusicMatch Jukebox can be told to do this directly by sorting on the track numbers in the track tags. Another problem with playlists is that if you rearrange the music files on your computer, your playlists become invalidated. This is not much encouragement to spend a lot of time making playlists. Perhaps in the future MusicMatch Jukebox will contain a file manager that lets you manage your files and have your playlists automatically updated to reflect the changed filenames and paths, but in the meantime playlists seem too problematic to rely on. Another annoyance is that the DDAR only becomes aware of a new track on your computer (or any other changes to your music library) if you rerun its cataloging program and have it search your hard drive to make a new catalog. It would be nice if the DDAR just figured this out automatically, though I suppose that this might be a difficult problem to solve. The DDAR comes with a remote control, which is nice, but unlike the remote control for my CD Jukebox, which has its own LCD display, the DDAR's remote is hard to make good use of from the sofa. Sure you can use it to skip to the next or previous track, but selecting an album with the remote control is next to impossible if you are more than a few feet away from the DDAR. You need to be close enough to navigate the menus that appear on the DDAR's LCD display. The remote does have a "speed-dial" like feature which allows you to program your favorite 100 albums, playlists, or artists. But since each speed-dial program is indicated by a two digit number, and since it would be very difficult to remember 100 different numeric codes, this feature is probably is only mostly useful for programming the ten albums that are on your current hotlist for this week. A nice thing about the DDAR is that you can put one in each room of your house and play different music in each room. The only limit, presumably, is how much data can be pumped over a 10 mb/s network. If you use 160 kb/s VBR mp3's, your practical limit will probably be fifty or so DDARs operating at the same time. (This is probably more than enough for the typical home user.) Unfortunately, there is no convenient way to tell multiple DDARs to play the same music. Such a feature would be useful for those times when you need to wander around the house. In addition to the limited feature set, the DDAR also currently has a couple serious bugs. Most disturbingly, the Windows software will not run on my computer at all unless RealJukebox is installed on the computer. If RealJukebox is not installed, the software crashes without any useful error message. It took me hours to figure this out. On the other hand, if RealJukebox is told about any music files on the computer, then the DDAR does weird things. The only way to have things work well is to have RealJukebox installed on the computer, but never use it. I suspect that this sorry state of affairs is caused by the fact that when I installed the DDAR I had both MusicMatch and RealJukebox installed on my computer, and that the DDAR's software can't cope with seeing both jukebox programs at the same time. On the other hand, uninstalling all of these programs and reinstalling only the DDAR software does not fix anything. I suspect that if RealJukebox is uninstalled some turd is left behind in the registry that confuses the still-in-beta DDAR software enough that it crashes. Another annoying bug is that if an artist appears with more than one casification -- e.g. if there are some tracks that are tagged as being by "artificial paradise" and some are tagged as being by "Artificial Paradise" -- then one of the casifications shadows the other, only tracks tagged with one of the casifications can be seen by the DDAR. The other tracks cannot be seen or played, at least when listing tracks by artist. The fact that the DDAR requires special software on the PC is also something of a worry. No doubt they will stop supporting the software when they have a new version of the DDAR and Windows 2002 comes out, and then my DDAR will be a pretty boat anchor. There's a competing new device known as the Audiotron (www.audiotron.net), or alternatively as the Gateway Connected Music Player. It doesn't require any special software on the PC. Instead, it just scours the network for SMB volumes, which could very well be disks on your Linux box running Samba. When told to, it will search certain directories on these volumes for mp3 and wma files and make a catalog. You can then use its console to browse through and play the files. At the moment, the Audiotron seems to be getting more attention on Usenet than the DDAR. Unlike the DDAR, the Audiotron doesn't have a built-in amp, so you can't connect it directly to speakers, but it does have the advantage of having a digital spdif output. It can only be a matter of time before more competitors enter the fray. |>oug