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Media Software Linux Technology

A Serious Contender for the Couch Throne 184

Posted by Zonk from the tux-in-unusual-places dept.
TractorJector writes "It is no secret that the competition for global domination in the operating system market has moved from the desktop to the living room couch. The Olive Symphony, a Linux-powered hi-fi wi-fi stereo hub, stands a decent chance for a prime position before the living room throne."
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A Serious Contender for the Couch Throne More

A Serious Contender for the Couch Throne

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  • So... uh... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:38PM (#13266234)
    Really... why do I need a "stereo hub"?

    I've got a stereo. Is that not good enough?

    This doesn't seem like it will be very likely to bring linux to the masses. Anyone who is enough of a technophile to be able to find a use for this thing already probably knows what linux is already.

    • Re:So... uh... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:06PM (#13267004)
      i'll tell you why - i have a VCR, a DVD player, a CD changer, a game cube, a receiver, and a digital cable box. this is not an uncommon setup. i have four remotes, and going from watching a movie to playing a game, or to recording a tv show, or to doing anything else involves a nightmarish process of changing the receiver to AUX1, or to VID2, or changing the audio output to dolby 5.1, or changing the aspect ratio on the TV to...

      imagine if you had to go through this same process on your PC every time you wanted to go from listening to an mp3 to watching a video. it's insane.

      you see where i'm going? all of these machines are dumb - none of them talk to each other. if i put in a DVD, i want the TV and all the audio components to know what's going on. if i turn on the game cube, i want the components to know what's going on. that's what this machine does - it makes stuff just work out of the box.

      • Ok, so basically you're looking for an appliance to unify all of your separate media players? Well, Yamaha along with a bunch of companies have been producing receivers capable of this for quite some time. I personally use this one [yamaha.co.jp] and it works great. I have an XBox, two DVD-players, digital TV-receiver, CD-player and a PS2.

        I guess my point is; this boxen is nothing new under the sun... Really.
      • I have a Denon AV receiver. When I want to watch a DVD, I push the DVD button on the Denon remote. The receiver automatically switches the video to a composite signal it has down-converted from S-video input 2, switches the audio to optical input 1, switches the surround sound mode to 5.1, and turns on the DVD player.
    • I don't know - when companies like Linn make similar products (and they have been for 4 years), then there is a good chance that something like this will be sold to people who have no idea what Linux is. Although the majority may well have heard of it.

      But an important distinction: just because people know what Linux is, doesn't mean that any of them choose to use it. Even if they wanted to, there are still many problems with configuration, etc. that they don't or can't.

      Until someone provides an X server tha

  • Oh Joy! An MP3 player! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Suicyco ( 88284 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:41PM (#13266247) Homepage
    Really, isn't that all this is? Its a networked mp3 player that looks like a stereo component - because it is, but whats the big deal? It has linux?

    What "throne" is it supposed to capture? Networked dvd players do this, plus they play movies. A mythtv box does much more.

  • Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pmdata ( 861264 ) * on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:41PM (#13266249)
    For $899 it better deliver my morning toast. I'm all for linux, but isn't the whole idea open source, low cost and "do it yourself"?

    • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)

      by strider44 ( 650833 )
      I'm all for linux, but isn't the whole idea open source, low cost and "do it yourself"?

      Where did you get that idea? It's just about code efficiency - if someone's already invented the wheel why keep on reinventing it over and over again.

      As for low cost, Cisco routers run linux, the top supercomputer in the world runs linux, Google's server farm runs linux. I'm not sure that "low cost and do it yourself" is really that much of a part of the open source requirements.
      • No arguments. I'll give you those examples. However, we are talking about end user goods here. For entertainment only, no less. I don't need 100% uptime for for my tunes. That is the linx I'm referring to here. Heck, build a "free" DVR with MythTV that will also play music. Low cost + open source + I learn something.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

      by maotx ( 765127 ) <maotx AT yahoo DOT com> on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:11PM (#13266349)
      For $899 it better deliver my morning toast.

      Actually, that is for covering the SCO licensing fees...

    • To be fair, it appears to come with classical music already loaded (in a lossless format). So that probably counts for something -- assuming that classical is your cup of tea.

      Don't ask me exactly what classical music is on it... perhaps the site has this information, but I didn't see it in the three minutes I spent there.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:2)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) *
      I'm all for linux, but isn't the whole idea open source, low cost and "do it yourself"?

      Someone did it themselves and is now marketing it to others. Just because Slashdotters can "do it themselves" and don't need to buy a Linux-based device to play networked MP3s doesn't mean other people won't.

      I honestly believe that this particular company priced their products out of a realistic range for most consumers. $900 for a stereo component that plays MP3s? Big fucking deal. Unless they are selling this thing
      • It's not even original. My ShowCenter 200 - at a fraction of the price - plays my mp3 collection just fine. It tells me the weather too.. so I don't have to look outside. Oh, and for a bonus - still at a fraction of the price - has feeds my HD flat panel with stuff as well (since HD is 6-12 months away from commercial availability in this country).
  • What si so special aboout this thing? Becasue it can take input from an anaglog or digital source? Hos is this better than a simple Soundblaster Audigy? [soundblaster.com]

    • Re:Please Explain (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      eye am note shure wut is sew speshul about it eether...it doesn't efen hace a spell checkur!

  • Serious contender? Not hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:45PM (#13266266)
    It's a streaming MP3 player with a job/shutle dial, a menu system not unlike an iPod, and a CD burner.

    Why would I be more interested in that than, say, a $99 Tivo that can stream MP3s, has an accessible UI, and can also record video.

    • As an audiophile and someone who sells equipment and music to audiophiles, I can vouch that this is EXACTLY what they want. If it had a hi-fi company's name on it, or better yet, Apple's name on it, it would be very successful. If it can provide better than CD quality sound in the future, it will be even better. I think Apple should just buy this company, modify the look and feel a little and mass produce it for $500. That's on par with the iPod itself...

      • Re:Because audiophiles have a lot of money... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @06:17AM (#13268223)
        As an audiophile and someone who sells equipment and music to audiophiles, I can vouch that this is EXACTLY what they want.

        You just defined the product in a way that will guarantee that it isn't a mass market winner. No niche product marketed to a select few with arguably better ears and money to burn will ever gain the "couch throne" (or whatever equally ridiculous faux title the article used).

        • Regardless of what the Slashdot summary suggested, I don't think that this product is designed for a mass-market audience. It's really attempting to cater to a niche market for people who want to keep a large library of un-compresed music at their fingertips.

          However, what this machine lacks, and what would really justify its price, would be if it was able to read and rip high-resolution audio formats. (Nonwithstanding that would probably be a DMCA violation.)
    • It's a streaming MP3 player with a job

      But will it's job get outsourced to India?

  • So hang on... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SamSim ( 630795 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:47PM (#13266272) Homepage Journal
    This thing is, in fact, neither a couch NOR a throne nor indeed any form of seating?
    • Damn. When I read that, I was hoping for something doublewide and porcelain, maybe with padded arms, to make my morning, uh, reading time, more comforable.

      Frankly, anything with Linux and embedded sensors there is going to provide far more information than this geek feels the need to know.

  • This thing is destined for only one throne... (Score:5, Funny)

    by stubear ( 130454 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:48PM (#13266279)
    ...and it's not the one in the living room.
  • Hi-fi = high fidelity (of the reproduced sound to the original sound source).

    Wi-fi = wireless fidelity???

    Are we choosing technical terms on the basis of making cool-sounding abbreviations, instead of having any technical meaning?

    Well, after podcasting, blogging and broadband, what did I expect...

    • Re:hi-fi wi-fi (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dominatus ( 796241 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:26PM (#13266396)
      Wifi has been a term for years, are you just now seeing it?
      • Wifi has been a term for years, are you just now seeing it?

        No, but I've started to see the term more and more. It's the same thing with blogs, for example. It wasn't annoying at first, as it was just another buzzword that had the potential to fade out. Now everything is blog-this and blog-that in the blogosphere and it's really starting to piss off people.

        • I'm pretty sure you're the only one who is pissed.

          Grow up, its marketing. Deal with it.
        • Just wait it gets worse. Soon everything will be Pod-this and Pod-that. Trust me it will happen.
      • He has a point... Wi-Fi really means nothing. It surprises me also that it is catching on. Not only does it mean absolutely nothing, it also sounds quite stupid.

    • Wifi is an odd term yes.

      However, podcasing makes sense. Its just like broadcasting. Broadcasting = putting something out there in the wide open. Podcasting = putting something out on ipods.

      Blogging is simply a shortened term for Web Logging, which means an online journal or record of events.

      Broadband is called such because it uses a broader waveband to transmit information (whether its data or voice transmission).

      These do in fact have technical meaning.
      • Broadband is called such because it uses a broader waveband to transmit information (whether its data or voice transmission).

        Broader than what?

        The problem starts with the concept of bandwidth, which is something measured in Hz, kHz, MHz etc. and is not the same thing as data transmission rate, but people use it that way nevertheless. From there, people use 'broadband' to mean high data rate.

        There is some connection between data rate and bandwidth, namely a linear one if other variables are equal. To

        • it uses a BROADER bandwidth than things like say dialup. It uses a broader bandwidth, not data transmission rate, actual bandwidth. that is why its broad-bandwidth/broadband. its consumers and marketers than confuse bandwidth with higher speed. broadband actually means a broader bandwidth.

          • Re: broadband (Score:3, Informative)

            by pboulang ( 16954 )
            I think you are over simplifying and making a generalization on the meaning of broadband which is misleading.

            Broadband is analog versus baseband which is digital. The fact that using broadband allows using mulitple channels means that overall, yes, can allow for higher bandwidth.. Compare ISDN to DSL. Baseband ISDN has a limitation due to the total amount of bits it can send (compressed lossless) over very specific channels/frequencies. Broadband DSL on the other hand, converts to analog, sends over multip

            • however if i'm not mistaken, a band is a set of frequencies which are used for the transmission of information/data/whatever. Broadband IS broader simply because it uses a broader range of frequencies.
              • Yup, and the broads I know all seem delighted by a wide range of frequencies

                The marketing on this product is uber-cool so whatever the operating system that is used, it certainly rings bells in the same market that the traditional audiophile suppliers have been going after for several years - multiroom sound systems. All it needs is a few reviews in the audiophile press to declare it a low cost wonder and it should sell well, it is actually a cheap component by the historical standards of the world of Hi-Fi
              • Yeah, that's kind of where I am picking nits.. Band usually refers to a single range (think equalizer) whereas fun broadband things like TDMA or CDMA use mutiple frequencies (non-sequential, hop around, etc) in which case the adjective "Broad" is less obvious..

                Not like we are disagreeing, I just think that it is a confusing measurement term to say broad when that discriptiveness is inherent in the concept of bandwidth. Bandwidth is a useful objective measurement, and broad is less so as it doesn't MEAN an

  • um... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Awesome, but will it play my techno? It seems to only support classical music, what a bummer.
    • Good thing that I'm often listening to trance music, which some of the extremely pretentious people who sadly also listen to it herald as the "new classical music". Morons.

  • I know where it goes! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'll put next to my Indrema!

  • Does anyone remember the time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by multiplexo ( 27356 ) * on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:55PM (#13266308) Journal
    When /. actually contained useful news stories about the tech industry and other areas of interest to geeks? I seem to recall such a time in the past. Now we have duplicate stories, stupid questions [slashdot.org] in ask /. and blatant product placements such as this one. It's a friggin audio player that uses embedded Linux. Big fucking deal! Nothing to see here folks. Move along. And if TractorJector had actually looked at the website he would have seen that the software to control the beast is proprietary and only available on MacOS X.

    Would it be too much to ask the "editors" of /. to stop posting stories of the form "There is a new device X out there that is controlled by Linux. Look out Microsoft/MPAA/RIAA/TSA/CIA/FBI/DoJ/Apple whoever because they're soon going to 0wnz0r all of your base!". I mean really, the fact that someone has come out with an MP3 player that is controlled via embeded Linux isn't news. It might have been eight years ago, but it isn't in 2005.

    • Apparently you haven't been reading for a while.

      You missed the number of pro-Microsoft stories too.
    • When /. actually contained useful news stories about the tech industry and other areas of interest to geeks?

      Yeah - it was before Microsoft invested so heavily in it. Surprise surprise.

    • Nope.

      But then, you've been around longer than me. Must've been then.
    • I wish I didn't have to agree.

      How did this story make the front page ? Who is it of interest to ?

      Are the editors or publishers of slashdot taking payola to post stories ? It was bad enough when the politics section went online as an extension of americans comng together. Now one after another stories about gadgets that only venture capitalists stupid enough to fund pets.com, or to think that cisco is worth more than GE could believe.

      900 bucks for a freaking MP3 player, that also handles flac ??? Is
  • And we are supposed to care that it runs Linux why?
  • $899? Holy crap. These guys are going to have to do some serious price-cutting if they really want to sell these boxes to anyone, let alone the open-source community.
    • This thing is targetted at the Open Source community like the TiVo is targetted at the open source community.

      (This being Slashdot, where anything more subtle than a marching band tends to be missed by a disturbing number of people, I'll spell that out: "Not at all.")
  • Is it me...or does the UI look like an iPod?
  • I have a modded xbox with XBox Media Center on it. I peruse my network shares, play mp3's, videos, whatever. Beats any setup I have seen in the store, or building a PC with tv out+good sound card.

  • Wow (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This thing is designed for classical music. It is specially tuned so that it plays the classical music at prime quality, rather than the crap MP3 quality which classic music puts out.

    It is not aimed at the open source community, this is for the picky old rich folks who love their music and want to be able to listen to it at full quality. The main reason you can tell this is because they offer a service to rip your music for you. This is not for the average home user, much less the average geek.

    • Re:Wow (Score:2)

      by bogie ( 31020 )
      " This thing is designed for classical music. It is specially tuned so that it plays the classical music at prime quality, rather than the crap MP3 quality which classic music puts out."

      Yep its "specially" designed to play classical. Oh, btw I have this bridge I'm trying to offload. Would you happen to know any buyers?

      Let me guess, your the original submittor trying to pump in some positive reviews of this thing since clearly we've all seen what a joke the website is and are all making fun of it.

      A device th
  • I'm looking for a product just like this -- an MP3 player with its own hard drive, so I don't need to have my power-hungry computer running. Ideally, it would also stream like the Squeezebox (and really ideally it would stream AAC-plus).

    I haven't seen such a product. This one comes fairly close, but lacks many essential features. The Blackbird [digitaltechniques.com] seems to be the best option currently, but at $500 I feel like I might as well buy a Mac Mini and write my own controller software.

    If anyone has a good overview of

  • Also known as Hifidelio (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:23PM (#13266386)
    Visit http://www.hifidelio.net/ [hifidelio.net]
    Looks really rather similar :)

    These guys (hermstedt) need a good kicking at the moment because they are up to version 2.0 of their firmware and still have not released source code.

    Putting that to one side, I have one of these and it really is rather good.

  • The device itself is good looking, and the feature set is awesome, but at $899 its a pretty pricey piece of kit. It seems to be able to connect to music shares though, and from the look of the screenshots there's a possibility it works with iTunes (although I can't find this stated anywhere). That would be extremely cool, as I've been looking for something that would allow me to play music from the iTunes shares around my network over my hi-fi.
  • There's already several things similar to this out there:

    http://www.elanhomesystems.com/product/music/viadj /viadj.asp [elanhomesystems.com]
    http://www.slimdevices.com/ [slimdevices.com]
    http://www.escient.com/products.html [escient.com]
    http://www.request.com/us/ [request.com]
  • I'd thought slavertisement was a clever pun, but now I'm convinced it's less a pun than truth. Oh, well. I still found it interesting at least.
  • out of the interview:

    "and I felt that digital audio devices were not living up to their potential, especially for classical music lovers and other audiophiles."

    Since when does your taste of music make you an audiophile?

    Something tells me it isn't too smart to market something as 'classical music only', I think it's this same genius that designed the thing in the first place (there's no digital out for instance)

    Imho this thing is a a serious contender for /dev/null
    • Actually there is a sizable market for classical music playback equipment, in the ultra-ultra-high-end. Many audiophiles (who really are just people with lots of disposable income and who think they have better hearing than anyone else) like classical music and jazz. Whether they become audiophiles out of an actual appreciation of classical and jazz music, or whether they like classical and jazz music because they're some of the only recordings which really sound much better on a serious high-end audio system, I'm not sure. If you read Stereophile or some of the other mags like it, it becomes clear that the tail wags the dog in a lot of areas ... people spend thousands of dollars on a stereo, and then go out and hunt for discs that actually have enough detail in the recording to sound better on them.

      But the audiophile market is incredible fickle, and I'm not sure whether a product like this would do well or not. (Although Stereophile did pick the iPod as one of its components of the year a while back...) Maybe if it was designed to work with huge volumes of uncompressed high-resolution music data, they could carve out a niche for it. But otherwise, and until somebody comes up with a way to rip SACDs and DVD-As, who cares. Also, the lack of a digital-out for use with an outboard DAC will probably lose them points in a review.

      Anyway, just my thoughts. The hifi audio world is a pretty strange, sometimes twisted place (where else can you spend $500 on a 3-pin IEC power cord?), and I don't think these guys are entering it correctly if they want to succeed there.
  • Can you get free advertising for anything running linux nowadays?
    • Can you get free advertising for anything running linux nowadays?

      Well, let's see...

      Come to venditor [venditor.com] the European shopping search engine and directory.

      It's not finished completely yet, but since when has that been a problem?
  • The problem with high end all-in-one media center PCs is that despite the claims of the vendors, they are either unable to scale to do all the high definition media encoding/decoding/storage tasks you need at once or are very noisy due to the cooling requirements of the high end processor.

    A solution is to use a rack of dedicated relatively low cost embedded systems that connect via ethernet to each other. You could purchase the components separately over time to meet your needs within your budget.

    1) Netwo

  • This thing is seriously overpriced ! (Score:3, Informative)

    by The_Spectry ( 900377 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @09:02PM (#13266495)
    Whats it consist of ? A hard drive , a basic display ,a cheap MB , and a cd rom . Sound familiar ? It should Those are all components of an XBOX minus the screen . SO figure a display might cost $100 to implement . How much does an XBOX cost ? Is it cool? Yes. Is it worth $899 ? NO . I just bought a laptop from dell for less than that . The price makes it laughable .

  • Yeah, but... (Score:4, Funny)

    by happymedium ( 861907 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @09:30PM (#13266606)
    Yeah, but does it run Li--oh wait.... Damn, there goes my post.

  • Who is Christian Einfeldt? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @10:26PM (#13266836) Homepage Journal

    TractorJector writes "It is no secret that the competition for global domination in the operating system market has moved from the desktop to the living room couch.

    I was about to say, "No, TractorJector didn't write that. It was cut and pasted verbatim from the first sentence of the article. Have the common decency blah blah blah." But hmm, now this is odd. It seems that every Slashdot story that TractorJector has submitted [slashdot.org] has been a Mad Penguin article by Christian Einfeldt.

    Christian Einfeldt, if you are indeed TractorJector or are affiliated with Mad Penguin in some way, please have the monads to disclose in your Slashdot submissions that you're the one who wrote the article. Really, it's okay to pimp your own stuff one the web. Everybody does it now that blogging is the current fashion. But submitting the articles under a pseudonym (especially ones with naive editors, like Slashdot) is just a wee bit underhanded and deceitful.
    • naive editors

      Is this some sort of reverse propaganda? Have you tried submitting to Slashdot before? It's nearly impossible to get your story posted, let alone a series of stories. And this person clearly does not have a way with words, yet still gets posted, so there is clearly some work behind the scenes with Slashdot. It's very common - I wouldn't be surprised if they take payolla from dozens of different companies to get stories posted. I think you are the naive one, sorry.

      LS

  • To all the "too expensive!" threads. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by copponex ( 13876 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @10:32PM (#13266868) Homepage
    If you want Linux to win some mindshare, you can't shoot down every company that tries to make money with it.

    Consider, for a moment, that it has DA and AD converters that are more than standard. Consider that it can stream to multiple sources wirelessly without having to learn how to use ndiswrapper.

    A year ago you all shelled out $600 for an iPod that had color. Is $300 more too much to spend on something that probably sounds better, and may offer many more features for a home sound system?

  • I'm confused... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ruiner13 ( 527499 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:08PM (#13267011) Homepage
    They are marketing this as the audiophile's music player, yet no where in their datasheet do they list the signal to noise ratio this thing uses. They also say it has a unique playlist editor, but from what I can tell, it is just a rehashed version of the iTunes interface, complete with "smart" playlists. For $900, this thing seems way overpriced and way under-innovated. It uses industry standard parts; CD-R, 2.5" notebook HD, and most likely a 4x 10/100 PCI NIC. From the sounds of the headline, I was expecting a small form-factor computer that could go in my entertainment center. This is the price of one, but without the actual computer. They say it uses a "lossless" compression, which just turns out to be FLAC. How did this make the front page? I don't even see where it says it runs Linux... It just says it uses a PowerPC chip, and considering how aligned they seem to be to Mac OS X, I would not be surprised to find it running that instead.

  • OT: Web/Graphic Design Critique (Score:3, Interesting)

    by venomkid ( 624425 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:45PM (#13267123)
    Okay, I don't mean to be a dickhead. Lord knows people have trashed this thing enough. But as a web/graphic designer looking at the site, I feel I have to comment...

    First, if you're going to have the "gigantic photograph" style of web design, for god's sake don't scale your photos up. It looks terrible, blurry, and amateurish.

    Second, if you're also going to do the "lines" thing, for everyone's sake pick a program that can do decent antialiasing. Your lines looks like a pixel orgy on my LCD.

    Third, as I know both of these elements seem to add up to "audiophile" site material (look at the Linn Audio [linn.co.uk] site), which is obviously what you're going for, but even Linn knows not to make a site that requires 1024x768 maximized to view, especially since your software is Mac only. On the Imac I'm currently using, your "My Account" link looks like "My Ac".

    Fourth, how about some real info on the product? I had to go through a few different scenes of your flash tour in order to find out that it could pull music from Mac and PC. Even if the playlist software is only for mac.

    Fifth, on the Sonata Shots, please PLEASE at least blur the text you've overlayed on top to make it look like it's really part of the LCD. It's such an obvious photoshop job it's not funny.

    Sixth, the icons you're using for the technical sheets for the thing are fuzzy and barely visible in the overall design. On top of that, putting the mouse over them doesn't reveal any kind of title or tooltip that would let a user know what they do. Really, just put the text somewhere, or at least make them a similar contrast to the text so we know they're important. They just look like more useless decoration.

    And last, the "different colors for different buttons" thing usually points to a color scheme for the different parts of the site or at least some kind of relevance. It's a nice visual cue. But on your site the colors are just random. Nothing makes sense. They even repeat nonsensically between different sections.

    The whole site reeks of imitation without understanding.

    Honestly, do what you're going to do. Make your product. I wish you success. But spend some money on a decent graphics person if you're going for the high end like this. Especially if your product is mac only for the software side. ...and I'd start putting "Mac only" at the top of every page, or you're going to be getting a lot of returns.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • is that it comes loaded with free music performed by the Olive Orchestra.
  • Uh oh, the product description on their website uses the phrase "best-of-breed technology".

    Stay away!! Stay far away!!

    But seriously, doesn't Netgear and Linksys make a very similar product that retails for about $125?
  • Well, I think it is. I couldn't really find any technical details in there, but I have been looking for YEARS for a media hub for my stereo. I don't want to have to stream music from a 400W computer that is running 24/7. I want basically a component mp3 player with a large HDD, nice interface, networking, and a few other features.

    Now it seems I have a choice: $150 for a streaming module, or $900 for one with a HDD. I think I will stick to hooking up my portable mp3 player to my stereo
  • Did anybody else notice this comment from the product description?

    Go to www.olive.us, click on "Explore".

    "Its pristine audio quality, combined with the proprietary Playlist music management software*, predestines..."

    The * at the bottom is "Mac OS X only".

    <sarcasm>Impressive.</sarcasm>

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