Keys Corner

If you’re thinking of buying a Roku Soundbridge and want to use it with iTunes, you need to be very careful what you buy. Roku is selling the Soundbridge under the Roku brand name and licensed to Pinnacle (“powered by Roku”). Only the oringinal Roku Soundbridge supports iTunes and DAAP servers, for example mt_daapd. Although the Pinnacle web site and their product packaging specifically state that iTunes is supported, it is not.

What has inspired Roku to license a crippled Soundbridge under the Pinnacle brand name isn’t clear, but as the Pinnacle marketing push seems to be coming from the UK, European buyers need to beware of buying the crippled version. Pinnacle, like Roku, is based in California, but has a strong presence in Europe.

The reason for the lack of iTunes support is, according to Mike Kobb in Roku’s Engineering Team on May 13th, “licensing issues” and they don’t expect that Apple will grant licenses to cover the Pinnacle version:

Statement from Mike Kobb

If you read the comments to my previous post, you’ll have seen that Volker invited us round to look at the Sonos set-up which he’s testing at the moment. A demo really is the best way to appreciate the kit, the hand controller is a little larger than an iPod and makes it easy to link the units in several rooms to play the same music, or if you prefer and the rooms are not all open plan, you can listen to completely different playlists in each room. Like an iPod, the nice thing is that you can display the album covers on hand unit’s display, which makes the selection process more like browsing your physical albums.

I’m not going to rush out right now to invest around 1000 – 2000 Euro, but if I can arrange to get the kit at US prices or the prices here drop a little, you will almost certainly find that we using a Sonos system here too within 12 months.

You can read much more about Volker’s experience with his installation on his blog. A good place to start is with his last post on Sonos, which links to the earlier ones.

With some reluctance, I have to admit that Volker is almost certainly right to say that the Sonos music system that he’s been testing recently has an excellent WAF (wife acceptance factor):

I pay a lot of attention to the way she adopts technology. There are a number of things that clicked immediately. One of them was digital photography. It was very liberating to practice without incurring additional cost. Hard disk recorder for TV, an automatic transmission in the car, heated seats, all of those were used immediately. Other things just fell to the wayside. Like the video recorder, the MP3 streamer, an iPod (!). But now the Sonos: She “got” it the first minute. Without looking twice she accepted the controller, and unlike me, never looked at the Mac or PC client.

Certainly Ute’s reaction to the technological examples he gives matches Ruth’s almost 100% – Ruth really still prefers a film camera. Not that I disagree with his reasoning, but at 1149 Euro for a starter kit, it is a trifle expensive. I’m pretty sure that Sonos or a system with similar functionality is where we will end up, but for now we’ll wait and see how the price develops and whether the competition in this area comes up with anything even better (we use a considerably cheaper Roku SoundBridge M1000 for now to stream music to the stereo, but the functionality is nowhere as complete as that of the Sonos kit).

Some time ago, we hooked up an iPod to the stereo, with the goal of moving the CDs into storage in the cellar and freeing up some space for the increasing number of DVDs that we seem to be acquiring. The CDs are in fact still in the lounge, although mainly because we haven’t cleared space to store them elsewhere.

However, whether the iPod is a viable alternative depends on your listening habits. I like to have background music on when I’m doing other things, so I use playlists a lot, which works well for me. Ruth likes to be able to pick a particular album to listen to. So Ruth wasn’t completely convinced that the iPod is the right way to go – you can wear your finger out on the scroll wheel before you can hear a piece by Yo-Yo-Ma.

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The postman delivered this (picture above) today. It gets its music directly from this, without the need to have any computers running:

More at the weekend, when I have more time. My first impression is … impressive device.