Seeing there is probs with ethernet/usb adaptors changing mid life how about cuddling up to someone and having an sonicblue approved ethernet adaptor to save hassel

I saw the competing HP box at the local Best Buy store recently. Like many of the items for sale in Best Buy it was not even hooked up so you could use it and nobody was looking at it (besides me).

Judging from the look and feel of it, the HP is a very cheaply made component. It had the "Hi there! I'm a crappy quality platic made in China piece of junk" written all over it. Even the buttons felt like they were about to fall off just from pressing them. This is not what I would expect from a $1000 piece of equipment! I thought to myself, "what's wrong with HP, aren't they embarassed to have their good name written on this trash?"

I would hope this new SonicBlue version of the same concept has the same high quality standards as our Empegs.

What SonicBlue really needs to do next is marry the audio and video products into a single unit. The same unit that records TV on a hard drive should also store your music. Considering they already have Replay TV and now this, maybe that's not too far away. Rob????

Strikes me that the competition for this comes down to the following:
- Home Brew
The ./ers favourite. I think we all understand that they just don't understand the
target market.
- HP Music Center
I don't know much about this, so can't compare it
- Compaq IPAQ Music Center
Seems to be targeted to much the same market, but it's cheaper. I'd be interested in
an in depth comparison. It includes 10BaseT as standard. Major drawback is that
it is a standalone unit - it can't serve diskless units like the Rio Receiver.
- Motorola/Simple Devices SimpleFi
Functionally this looks like the strongest competitor. It's inherently wireless and also has a
wireless in Car unit that communicates with the home unit as soon as it's in range.
Major drawback is that it's not actually available yet. Estimated pricing looks lower, but
it's not clear whether this includes the cost of wireless networking or not.

The compaq box doesn't include 10-base-T; it has PNA2.0 (10mbit) like the HSX. There is currently no PC transfer software, and support for only one USB->Ethernet adaptor that is now not available.

(info as of about now, from the compaq ipaq users mailing list on egroups)

Hugo

There's nothing "missing" from the product as it will ship, although I'm sure we will add lots of new things in future updates. There's one major ticklist item that the HSX109 doesn't currently have (apart from car player synchronisation) which would seem like an obvious candidate for the first update, but I'll let you work out what that is.

Rob

Dunno if the guys are interested in saying why, though...

No, not really. Talking about the American legal system always makes me depressed.

Rob

I thought the american legal system was easy those with the most expensive lawyers win

well the lawyers win if no one else

In reply to:

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There's one major ticklist item that the HSX109 doesn't currently have (apart from car player synchronisation) which would seem like an obvious candidate for the first update, but I'll let you work out what that is

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gnutella support?

Aha. The games put it in a different class than it otherwise would be in, right? Which probably means avoiding getting into legal trouble or having to pay royalties or license costs or something. I agree with you, the American legal system seems to me to be rapidly spinning out of control where these new technologies are concerned...

/Pepijn

Firstly a very nice looking system.

Is the HD 2.5 or 3.5 inch? Is it possible to install say a 120Gb 5400rpm Maxtor?

Can I *REALLY* use this as my MP3 server? i.e. Can I export it's music database to a LAN via NFS, SMB etc?

Thanks, Carl

P.S. Pity about lack of onboard ethernet... USB is *slow* for larger volume transfers.

Is the HD 2.5 or 3.5 inch? Is it possible to install say a 120Gb 5400rpm Maxtor?

It's a 3.5 inch (since this is a home unit).

Exactly which drives you can install, I don't know about. I would guess that just about anything would work (like the car player), but I'm not sure. Empeg guys, any comment on this?

Can I *REALLY* use this as my MP3 server? i.e. Can I export it's music database to a LAN via NFS, SMB etc?

Currently it doesn't have NFS or Samba on it, I don't think. It's designed to serve other Rio products, so its built-in protocols are proprietary.

HOWEVER...

Those proprietary protocols are well-documented (they were reverse-engineered for the Rio Receiver) so you could write your own receiver application,

AND...

Just like the car player, it runs a pretty straightforward Debian subset, so adding Samba shouldn't be too tough.

OR...

You could probably get Displayserver running on the thing with little trouble and it could be an HTTP music server.

Seeing there is probs with ethernet/usb adaptors changing mid life how about cuddling up to someone and having an sonicblue approved ethernet adaptor to save hassel

There are two SonicBlue Approved usb-to-ethernet adapters for the HSX-109 already. One of them is the Linksys USB10T and I forget what the other one is. They are listed in the player's "About" menu.

Exactly which drives you can install, I don't know about. I would guess that just about anything would work (like the car player), but I'm not sure. Empeg guys, any comment on this?

We haven't tried it, and it would void your warranty, but in theory any IDE drive should work. Cooling is the only potential problem. Oh, and I'm not sure when bigger-than-128Gb support went into the Linux kernel; we use 2.4.13-ac8.

Unlike car players, you can't add a second drive (there's only one IDE channel, and its slave position is occupied by the CD).

Those proprietary protocols are well-documented (they were reverse-engineered for the Rio Receiver) so you could write your own receiver application

Someone really needs to write a Receiver client plugin for Winamp. Someone's needed to for a while, in fact -- but someone really needs to now the audio centre is released.

Peter

If you're going really big, you may need to add more memory (it has 16MB, but pads for another 16). It'll work fine as-is, but will probably get slower the bigger the database is.

This isn't auto-detected by the system though, which means some hackery would be required :|

Hugo

Currently it doesn't have NFS or Samba on it ... Those proprietary protocols are well-documented

Just to be pedantic, NFS is hardly a proprietary protocol. It's documented in RFC 3010. And earlier versions in RFCs 1094, 1813, 2054 and 2055.

NFS is hardly a proprietary protocol.

I did not mean that NFS and Samba were proprietary. I meant that the Rio Receiver streaming protocol was proprietary, but documented well enough so that you could write your own software which utilized it.

It'd help if my foot was actually bigger than my mouth. Oh, well.

Someone really needs to write a Receiver client plugin for Winamp.

Er, Winamp will stream the MP3 data directly from the server. It's HTTP. All you need is navigation software, and Winamp doesn't have that anyway.

Wait, so you're saying that I could possibly format a URL string that could stream a song straight off of the Jupe, without a Rio Receiver or Displayserver or some other third party software in the mix?

Heh, sorry, let something slip in that post... "Jupe" is my nickname for the HSX-109, which is a shortened form of its internal code name... Rob, hope you don't mind. I'll edit the post if it's a problem.

The point of a codename is that people can hear it and have no idea what you're talking about. Now the product is announced it's a moot point anyway!

Rob

Ah, good. For the uninitiated, the internal code name of the HSX-109 was "Jupiter". The Rio Receiver was "Mercury". There are other internal codes named after planets in the solar system. Dunno what they'll do when they run out of planets, move on to moons I suppose.

There's a great story related to this, I've been itching to tell:

When Rob adds a new product code to the internal bugbase, if he forgets to set the permissions on the product right away, some of us alpha team people might see its code name in the pull-down list until he catches on.

Recently, Rob added an internal project name (another planet name) to the bugbase, one which I'm not allowed to see. When I saw it in the list, I ICQ'd him and said, "Hey, so how's that <<planet_name>> project coming along?". He comes back surprised and alarmed, "How do you know about that?!", and I replied, "I didn't, I just tried a random planet name and you fell for it."

So,
Maybe what Peter was getting at/suggesting was a plugin to WInamp that allowed you to navigate your HSX 109 based or PC based [with Rio Receiver software] mp3 collection from within Winamp then?

If thats the case, then Winamp v2.X has limitations in this area, so I would suggest that this worthy project could be done within Winamp 3.X [which is still in beta], but which is supposed to have a much more extensible UI - perhaps even allowing you to replicate the Rio Receiver UI to a point if thats desired].

Now, that would be a possible feature that might get some folks interested in *buying* the HSX who might not otherwise want to buy it.

In reply to:

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There's nothing "missing" from the product as it will ship, although I'm sure we will add lots of new things in future updates. There's one major ticklist item that the HSX109 doesn't currently have (apart from car player synchronisation) which would seem like an obvious candidate for the first update, but I'll let you work out what that is

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My pick for the missing ticklist item you refer to is the ability for these units to network with each other for backup/synchronisation purposes and also to let you stream mp3 files from another HSX 109 for playback purposes [this in effect allows remote control of 1 HSX 109 by another - and/or (even more useful perhaps)by a PC and/or web browser?].

This is what the ReplayTV units can do right now - move shows between units so it would be logical for the HSX to support this also.

I am sorry but i have to ask is anyone working on Uranus

I had to say this before anyone else rolled out the bad taste joke

Roger just posted this nifty link on the Rio Receiver BBS:

http://www.differentpla.net/~roger/empeg/receiver/

How to use HTTP to query a Rio Receiver server...

Question for the OS gurus: given that the unit has two audio outputs (TOSlink and RCA), would it be possible for the player to send one audio stream to the TOS and a different one to the RCAs ? Either stream could come from the hard disk or the CD.

Unlike car players, you can't add a second drive (there's only one IDE channel, and its slave position is occupied by the CD).

In the case of upgrading drive sizes, is it possible to unhook the CD and put in the lager drive then clone the contents of the original drive to it?
Would it be possible to do this in some manner in a PC?
just looking at it from a service POV.

I'm sure you could, but everything would have to be done at the shell prompt. Similar to the way we copy FIDs when upgrading the car player's hard disk.

I know it's not strictly an 'empeg' product, but will we see any prototype and internal photos and stories on the geek site?