Roku SoundBridge Review

Overview
The Roku Soundbridge is a well thought out streaming music player created by Roku Labs. It plays a ton of different formats like mp3, ogg, wma, wav, m4a, even flac. You can download the simple and elegant open source Firefly Media Server from their site, but it works with just about any UPnP media server application, like iTunes or TonkyVision or Yahoo Music Engine.

It can also play internet radio, so you can listen to any radio station in the world that has a web presence.


The Details
Dude, forget burning CDs or manually loading songs onto some flash or harddrive based music playing device. You hook this bad boy into your network, either with ethernet or with wifi and bing bang bong, it will automatically detect all the media servers on your network. You pick media server, then a playlist, artist, album or song, and it'll start playing all your favorite Hilary Duff songs. All your music is stored in one central place in a neat and tidy format. No more stacks of CDs. Frag that.

You can create playlists either in your media software, or on disk by just listing out your songfiles in a text file ending in .m3u. Pretty handy if you're a scripter type. The device has a built-in web server/web UI as well as two control ports to which you can connect to get system information and control the music playback, respectively. There's even a module on cpan written by yours truly that will let you load up playlists and songs via the playback control port from your commandline. One of the niftier things about the SoundBridge is that you can take control of the display via the system control port and scroll whatever you'd like across the display, ranging from "Time to make the donuts" to "I hope you enjoy your VD" (Eh, that's Valentine's Day).

The device can stream internet radio without needing access to a computer on the network. It has a headphone jack so theoretically you could take it to an internet cafe, plug your headphones in and listen to streaming radio all day long. You'd look kinda silly though.

I have three devices sprinkled through-out my apartment, each with a different setup. One is hooked up to my Onkyo receiver via optical output, the other is hooked up to a boombox via the headphone jack and aux-in and the third is hooked up to powered computer speakers via headphone jack (we're a little short on space in that area). Speaking of space, the unit is a nice little tube shape that can fit into tiny spaces. It's also portable, so when I went to clean out the storage closet in the car port, I took one of the Roku's, and hooked it into my car stereo's aux-in
and voila, my awesome music collection shepherded me through the tedium. Pretty clever, I thought.

If you have a subscription to Yahoo Music, then you can enable music sharing and listen to all your rented DRM'ed music on the Roku. This and the streaming internet radio feature open up limitless music possibilities.

The Good
Everything I've mentioned thus far. I loved the first Roku I bought that I got 2 more matching ones.

The Bad
One feature that is missing that people have been bitching about is rewind/fast forward. You can skip songs, but you can't cue/review. I've learned to live without it, so it really isn't a big deal. In theory a future version of the firmware could fix this (by the way, updating the firmware is really easy, it notifies you that there's a new version and with your permission self updates).

The Alternatives
The competitor to this device is the Squeezebox by Slim Devices. I don't actually own one of these, but I know a little bit about them from talking to people who do. While for the most part they do similar things, there are some fundamental differences. With Roku, all of the logic to play music is in the firmware on the device itself. With Squeezebox, most of the logic is in the open source SlimServer, written in Perl. This allows you to monkey with the functionality more and opens up more possibilities in the future. Incidentally, I believe that Roku also works with SlimServer, so you have those possibilities as well with Roku.

SqueezeBox has Rewind/Fast Forward and it also can act as an ethernet bridge, so if you have a device in your entertainment center that can only do ethernet (like the original PS3), you could plug it into the Squeezebox which is also wireless.

I don't think that SqueezeBox works with rented DRM music (DRM 10), but I could be wrong. SqueezeBox is also taller than Roku, so it wouldn't fit in 2 of the 3 places Roku is now in my apartment.

SqueezeBox is also twice as expensive as the Roku, so it's harder to buy a whole bunch to sprinkle around.

The Verdict
Time to step out of 1998 and buy this thing.