MOsanthrope

Posted by Chris on January 3, 2006 at 3:56 pm.

Music is a great love of mine. Although my album collection contains a disproportionate number of indie and punk titles dating back to my days in college radio, I’m not really an aficionado of any particular band or genre. There isn’t much music I don’t enjoy.

I’m also a geek. I don’t mean the “check out my new camera phone — it’s got bluetooth!” kind of geek that’s fashionable nowadays. I mean the kind of geek that harvested parts from old TV sets to build oscilloscopes, understood the color bands on resistors at age 10, and used a soldering iron to upgrade my first store-bought personal computer’s memory (from 8K to 32K RAM!) so that I could fill up its cassette drive with more BASIC code. Long before anyone except Al Gore had heard of the Internet, I ran a multi-node BBS using customized BBS software, an arcane DOS multitasking system and later OS/2. I still prefer to administer my servers with a Linux shell and command line, rather than a GUI. That kind of geek.

That probably explains why I love this thing,

given to me by my wife as a combination birthday/Christmas gift. (Note to young couples planning a family: December birthdays suck). It’s a Roku SoundBridge m1000, a network music player which plugs into my receiver’s optical digital input and connects to my wireless home network using its built in wi-fi adapter. It’s controlled by remote control, a web browser interface or an application running on my laptop.

When connected to my TwonkyVision music server, the SoundBridge permits me to instantly play or queue any track from my collection of several hundred albums. It can browse or search a connected music library by track, artist, composer, album or genre and play custom playlists. In combination with my Rhapsody music service subscription, the unit allows me to play any of Rhapsody’s more than one million available titles virtually on demand. (The SoundBridge also supports iTunes, MusicMatch Jukebox and others). In addition, it plays streaming content from my favorite Internet radio stations, including radioparadise.com, smoothjazz.com and thousands of SHOUTcast radio stations.

Roku’s engineers are some serious geeks. Its firmware includes embedded web and telnet servers and may be updated via the Internet. Roku frequently provides firmware updates to add features or improve functionality.

I initially experienced some difficulty getting the unit to operate as I wished on my home network. I then read the owner’s manual section aptly entitled “GEEKS – READ THIS” and learned that I was able to telnet into the unit and configure its various network and other settings to my heart’s content.

Its firmware also includes a TCP/IP-based control protocol that allows remote control of the unit via the network. Because Roku makes the protocol available to developers on its web site, a number of third-party applications are available to control the SoundBridge.

To try out the protocol I whipped up a little script which queries the unit and displays “now playing” information on the sidebar of my main web page. My wife, who also loves the SoundBridge but is definitely not a geek, was not impressed. “Why would you do that?” she asked, “people can’t even listen to the songs.” “Because I can,” I replied. It’s a geek thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Investment gurus recommend that you “invest in what you know.” It’s too bad that Roku is a privately-held company. Both the music lover and the geek in me think that this will be the next big thing.

Filed under: Technology, Computers, Electronics, Networking, Music, Internet