Roku Labs SoundBridge M500 Review

[dang]

Checkout our latest review of the Roku Labs SoundBridge M500 (http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review2166.html)The attractive Roku SoundBridge lets you play your PC or Mac digital music files anywhere in the house, just hook it up to your home theater.

[bubernak]

Hi, I'm looking for the simplest way to be able to play digital music that I've stored on my PC on my home stereo system and came across your review of the Roku Soundbridge. I just have a couple questions I was hoping you could answer. It sounds like the Roku products work with iTunes, so is it possible to install one of these Soundbridges, go into iTunes on my PC, setup a (for example) "party mix" and play the mix to have continous music for a few hours coming from my stereo system? Also, I was a little confused about the limitation about not being able to play music from shared folders/drives on a network. All my music is on one of two hard drives physically installed in my PC...will I be able to access those files? Finally, I'm not exactly an expert at setting up WiFi networks, is the setup of this Soundbridge fairly straightforward, and getting it to work with iTunes somewhat intuitive? Thanks, Mike

[jtfields]

I don't own a Roku but from what I've read doing what you want is probably fairly easy.

Be sure and check out the Squeezebox at http://www.slimdevices.com/ The SlimServer software for the Squeezebox "integrates" with iTunes in that it sees your iTunes library and playlists and will play them. The Squeezebox is very simple to set up (select DHCP or enter an IP address, your wireless SSID and WPA or WEP key.) The way it will handle your multiple drives is that when you set up the SlimServer you designate one music folder, however, if this folder has links (shortcuts) to other folders or hard drives it will scan those as well and include them in your library. If you are using the iTunes integration then as long as both drives are part of your iTunes library then they will show up. If you use it with the Roku your setup would also be done in this manner as well.

The Roku supports SlimServer as the guys as Slim Devices made the SlimServer software open source. SlimServer is the most flexible and configurable of the ways to control your Roku and if you ever want to sync multiple Roku's or play certain filetypes then it will be necessary to use SlimServer. SlimServer is also cool because of the open source aspect which means that people are always adding features and even if the company goes out of business there is an established community of independent developers devoted to it. When used with the Roku it basically makes the Roku act like a Squeezebox (less some features.) However, when they release a new version of SlimServer you often will have to wait for Roku to figure out the changes and then update their firmware to support it. Roku also recently indicated in their forums that they haven't decided if they are going to continue to support SlimServer.

The only thing the Roku has going for it over the Squeezebox is that they offer multiple models to let you spend more or less money for a bigger or smaller screen (I wish they offered a Squeezebox with the Roku M2000 screen size.) The Squeezebox recently updated their "look" so I guess it is a matter of taste as to which think is more stylish. I'd base my decision on quality over style though if I were you. I don't know the Roku inside and out but the Squeezbox's hardware spec's and features are tough to beat for the money (wireless G versus Roku's wireless B, can be used as wireless bridge, has Burr-Brown DAC, native FLAC support, etc.).

Good luck.