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MP3beamer Released

Posted by Hemos on Mon Feb 28, 2005 12:10 PM
from the connect-to-everything dept.
Media Music Software Linux
An anonymous reader writes "MP3tunes, Michael Robertson's new music venture, has released a snazzy linux music appliance called MP3beamer. The $399 box auto-rips CDs and imports MP3s and then connects to iTunes, Java devices, media receivers, web devices even WinCE units with handy feature to "sync" songs from server to remote machine for offline playback not just streaming - see screenshots. Last time Robertson launched something with "Beam" in the name it led to avalanche of lawsuits and more then $150MM in legal payments with BeamIt from the old MP3.com." It'd be excellent to get a review of one of these machines; looks like a good one.
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  • WOW! (Score:5, Informative)

    by j0nkatz (315168) * <`my.spam' `at' `mac.com'> on Monday February 28 2005, @12:12PM (#11803650) Homepage
    EVEN BETTER! [mp3beamer.com] It appears they are selling just the software for $70 to let you use your own machine as the "beamer" hardware. OS included!!

  • Worth a look (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Deekin_Scalesinger (755062) * on Monday February 28 2005, @12:13PM (#11803654)
    Reminds me of Tivo for the musically inclined. Consumers do seem to like black boxes, as long as they work right the first time. I'd look at this for myself - it would be nice to have a music only drive and dedicate one machine for that task. Four hundred is a decent price point as well.

  • Beamer? (Score:5, Funny)

    by turtled (845180) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:13PM (#11803657)
    Only MP3 Beamer I can think of is the iPod for the BMW.

    Interesting, none-the-less.

  • $150MM?!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by aendeuryu (844048) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:13PM (#11803662)
    Picturing Dr. Evil, giggling and saying "Unless you give us 150 Million Million dollars!!! Mwahahaha etc. etc."
    • MM is for "million" because M is for "mthousand." It comes from the Roman Emperor Maximus who was known for having thousands.
      • Actually, in roman numerals, MM is 2000. Notice the end of tv shows, now it would show MMV as the year for 2005.

        To my knowledge, there was no standard convention for #'s 5000 and over.
        • Notice the end of tv shows, now it would show MMV as the year for 2005.

          And here I always thought that meant [Your] "Mileage May Vary", as in the show's creators thought it's good but everybody else on the planet likely thinks it stinks.
    • I thought that it was 150 millimeters [national-d...d-gold.com]
  • All I need is one of these that can convert on-the-fly from a native store of FLAC to MP3 or Vorbis depending on the using application. Oh, and, currenntly, an 800 GiB hard disc. *sigh* Yeah, I know, "not the target market" and all that jazz, and I'll probably get one regardless of the lack of FLAC/Vorbis, but...

  • Slimserver (Score:5, Informative)

    by Quixote (154172) * on Monday February 28 2005, @12:15PM (#11803678) Homepage Journal
    This appears to be an Asus Pundit [asus.com] with Linspire. The music server component is a hacked-up Slimserver [slimdevices.com], as clarified by Robertson himself [gmane.org] (see link for more answers from him).

    Still, looks like a nice box.

    --
    Does MSN censor search results? [buffalo.edu]

  • And for $100 more... (Score:5, Informative)

    by sootman (158191) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:16PM (#11803688) Journal
    ...you can get a Mac Mini to do just about all that and more. I have mine hooked up to my TV doing most of what this does, as well as playing games, showing slideshows, and ripping and playing DVDs.

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MrAnnoyanceToYou (654053) <dylan@dyl a n brams.com> on Monday February 28 2005, @12:18PM (#11803708) Homepage Journal
    A machine you can put on autopirate and it works! A new generation of AI!

  • Slimserver (Score:4, Informative)

    by jhernand (180688) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:19PM (#11803725)
    This product borrows heavily from the OSS Slimserver product, which is primarily developed for the Squeezebox and SliMP3 by http://www.slimdevices.com/ [slimdevices.com]Slim Devices.

  • This is actually pretty interesting... (Score:3, Informative)

    by William_Lee (834197) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:19PM (#11803730)
    If you check out the site, they're offering the software only for around $70 which makes it a more viable solution for many of us unwilling to buy a box for $400.

    The only box that has to be running Linux is the main beamer, so you could easily work this right into an existing home M$ network.

    It even looks like you can beam your collection remotely to work.

    Also, different users can play different tunes at the same time.

    It seems pretty cool and useful at first glance.

  • My free solution... (Score:5, Funny)

    by borawjm (747876) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:21PM (#11803764)
    I use my roomates machine to stream and store all of my music. He doesn't notice and it cost me no money.

    Did I mention that he's not very computer literate?

  • AAC Support (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Synesthesiatic (679680) * on Monday February 28 2005, @12:22PM (#11803766) Homepage
    It kinda sucks that it doesn't at least include unprotected AAC support. It seems like, outside of Apple, AAC is turning into a flop (although I know the Roku Soundbridge supports it).

    Heck, with Hymn [hymn-project.org] they could even add support for iTMS files, outside of the US anyways. Not that it matters. If I wanted to change portable players I'd just find one that played unprotected AAC and run my music through Hymn myself. But there don't seem to be any options out there!

    • It kinda sucks that it doesn't at least include unprotected AAC support. It seems like, outside of Apple, AAC is turning into a flop (although I know the Roku Soundbridge supports it).

      I currently run SlimServer on an old Dell Optiplex, and it supports AAC -- via re-encoding on the fly with faad2. I don't know if the Roku Soundbridge uses this method (it also uses SlimServer) or if the hardware natively supports it, but it makes sense that the MP3Beamer ALSO supports AAC via re-encoding on the fly, given t

  • Where's the utility? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Radi-0-head (261712) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:23PM (#11803783)
    So why can't I do this with my existing machine and maybe an additional hard disk for storage? Oh wait, I already do!

  • free schwag (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord_Dweomer (648696) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:23PM (#11803784) Homepage
    "It'd be excellent to get a review of one of these machines; looks like a good one."

    In other words, Slashdot editors want a free one to play with.

  • A while back I noticed that iTunes has the ability to automatically rip a CD when it's put in the drive. And when it's done the CD can be automatically ejected. I'm not certain but I suspect that combined with some Applescript and a CD jukebox could be a frightenly effective combination. How much you wanna bet that programmers at Apple have already done it for themselves?

  • Sync to iTunes - How? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Slackrat (128095) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:25PM (#11803801)
    In the product FAQ [mp3beamer.com], they mention an MP3Beamer Sync component that automatically syncs your iTunes collection with your MP3Beamer collection. I'm curious how they pulled this off. Does the iTunes Sharing protocol (DAAP) support file upload? Or are they pushing the music in some other way?
  • Seriously, I'd prefer to have my music in a format unemcumbered by licensing fees to Thompson...

  • is $MM a Britishism? International unit? (Score:5, Funny)

    by xtermin8 (719661) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:33PM (#11803876)
    $150 in M&Ms would not be so bad. If only my Ex-wife had only asked for that!
  • As many others here have stated, it looks like this machine is just running a modified version of the SlimServer software. I was shopping for wireless MP3 players last year and I got myself a Linksys WMLS11B. This MP3beamer says that certain media receivers can play the content stored on it, and it shows a picture of the WMLS11B.

    My question is, how are they doing that? The server component I need to use currently is MusicMatch, which sucks. I need to run Windows on a seperate computer for it and it's very
  • Apple already beat them [apple.com] to the punch. Wait, wrong Beamer...

    • Re:Very interesting concept (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Deekin_Scalesinger (755062) * on Monday February 28 2005, @12:16PM (#11803685)
      Having your music on one box might be appealing to some - heck, it is to me. Part os it is I dont want to keep a 550 watt machine going solely got music streaming - it does make a dent in your electric bill. It appears to be pretty portable too - if the functionality is as expected this will be a hot seller IMO.

      • Re:Very interesting concept (Score:5, Informative)

        by tdemark (512406) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:34PM (#11803878) Homepage
        Not that I don't agree with you, but you do realize that the specs for a power supply list how much power it _can_ supply, not how much it _does_ supply at any given point?

        For example, the server that I use for development, storage, MP3, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, SMB, etc is an AMD 2600 with two (2) 200GB 7200 RPM drives and 1 GB RAM.

        Even though it has a 400W power supply, I've measured [smarthome.com] that it uses 140W.

        Regardless, your point still stands as the server costs about $15 / mo to run.

      • Re:Very interesting concept (Score:4, Informative)

        by DaEMoN128 (694605) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:55PM (#11804172)
        If you are worried about the electric bill, build a mini-itx based system. They can be ran off of a 60 watt power supply (some require 90) and would make a great dedicated music server. They are not powerfull enough to worry about your electric bill.....and some can be nearly silent (no fans) except for hd and cd noise.

    • Re:Very interesting concept (Score:5, Funny)

      by sabernet (751826) on Monday February 28 2005, @12:16PM (#11803689) Homepage
      But according to Napster, iTunes can cost you 10,000$!!
    • As the other poster indicated, it does run a P4-derived Celeron [as a sidenote, isn't it about time to retire the product name Celeron? It has caused confusion since the days of the Celeron 300a]. Personally I'd rather it ran a low-power processor, such as a Pentium M or Powerstep processor, or even the via processors (formerly Cyrix). A 2.4Ghz Celeron is a ridiculous power hog for something that plays MP3s. Hell I put together a fully capable full-video media player machine with a 2.4Ghz Celeron.

    • MOD PARENT DOWN. (Score:5, Informative)

      by garcia (6573) * on Monday February 28 2005, @12:29PM (#11803843) Homepage
      Do any of the moderators actually read the fucking article first?

      The CPU is a 2.4Ghz Celeron. It's not an expensive P4.
    • People are generally impatient. If the box takes 10 minutes to encode one MP3, nobody will want it.
    • But when you're talking about an appliance, you really only want it to do one thing well. Otherwise just get a decent desktop.

      That said, I have a couple of squeezeboxes connected to a slimserver, and it does what it does nicely. No muss, no fuss.

      • in general i agree with you but itunes (which would be the central tool used here) is best of class and of breed when it comes to MP3..

        exceptions would be ogg vorbis or other things like that 99% of people do not care about...
    • Easy answer: check out Slim Devices Squeezebox. Here's how it addresses your needs:

      1. The box is barely wider or taller than the display, and it's not very deep, either.

      2. The output is analog or digital stereo, not 5.1 or 7.1, but it doesn't funnel video anyway so there's no need for surround sound support (unless there's 5.1 and 7.1 non-movie audio out there?)

      3. You can use the remote and the surprisingly large and bright screen to configure your player, search through your music, build playlists, adju

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