Get More Out of Your Wireless Network - Music Player (Part I)

Wi-Fi: It’s not just for laptops anymore. With these products and tips, you can cut the cord when making phone calls, streaming music or video, sharing files, and more.

If you think your wireless network is good only for using a laptop in the living room, think again. A slew of new Wi-Fi peripherals promises to send your music, movies, pictures, and even phone calls flying from room to room, no cables required. These days, we’re seeing products for just about any task that might benefit from going wireless.

Not surprisingly, some of the newcomers don’t live up to the hype. In this series, we checked out 12 of the latest cordless creations in several categories to determine which products are good mates for Wi-Fi and which still need some work.

Wireless Music Player

Today’s Wi-Fi enabled streaming music players let you access your entire digital music collection from any room in the house. The ones we tried were by far the most consumer friendly, mature, and useful of the Wi-Fi peripherals we evaluated here. Each allows you to plug in your powered speakers or hook up to a tuner with standard cables, so you can play music on your existing stereo. The devices can also bypass your PC to play Internet radio stations, and you can set up multiple units to play tunes from one PC.

We took a look at three popular players: D-Link’s DSM-120 MediaLounge Wireless Music Player, Roku’s SoundBridge M1000, and Slim Devices’ Squeezebox version 3.

The SoundBridge and the Squeezebox have slick interfaces, great sound quality, and robust features. Though the Squeezebox’s extras make it our favorite, the SoundBridge and the MediaLounge have the digital rights management (DRM) support required to play Napster and Rhapsody files.

D-Link DSM-120

This stylish music streamer has a digital optical output jack for higher quality audio with compatible receivers, as well as standard analog outputs and support for most unprotected music formats. It doesn’t handle iTunes AAC files, but it does support Windows DRM-10 audio playback, as well as protected Napster and Rhapsody music, via Windows Media Connect. A USB port on top lets you play tunes from a flash drive, and you can install a 2.5-inch hard disk. You also get an alarm clock feature, which will play music on cue from an installed (not a flash) drive.

A few things left us less than tingly, though. The companion PC software for music-folder and playlist setup isn’t very friendly, and the number-pad remote control makes entering song titles or other alphabetic information painful. Also, Live365 is your only Internet radio option.

Roku SoundBridge M1000

The SoundBridge, a sleek player with a big, bright fluorescent display. It has digital optical and coaxial outputs, and it supports Windows DRM, iTunes, and unprotected AAC music formats.

Interestingly, the SoundBridge has no PC software to install. Instead you use Windows Media Connect, or one of several popular software music players including iTunes, Musicmatch, Napster, and Rhapsody in its music-sharing mode. Or you can use Roku competitor Slim Devices’ excellent open-source Slim-Server software, which includes support for FLAC and Ogg Vorbis playback.

The SoundBridge’s visual display is nice, excellent Internet radio interface, and wide range of supported stations, including Rhapsody. But as with its MediaLounge counterpart, its remote control could use text-entry buttons.

By the time you read this, Roku plans to ship an alarm clock version of the SoundBridge, the R1000 with 18 Internet radio presets.

Slim Devices Squeezebox

The elegant Squeezebox device uses 802.11g Wi-Fi, and is the only one of the three to support WPA encryption, the more-secure successor to the WEP encryption in the other products. An alarm clock and a headphone jack make the Squeezebox a fine bedside companion.

Getting the SqueezeBox to work with the convenient remote (which has an alphanumeric keypad for easier navigation) took just a few minutes; on the PC side, the useful SlimServer software was simple to install and set up.