Roku SoundBridge

Yesterday my new NAS arrived, to replace my aging and failing hacked Linkstation. As part of the bundle I also received a Roku SoundBridge, which was a nice surprise. Basically, it's a consumer-orientated device which plays music from iTunes or Internet radio, which you would plug into a hifi or powered speakers. I'd heard of these before but I've been using my old ThinkPad X22 for this duty for a while now, and MPD has served me well. I thought I'd give it a go, and I'm actually really impressed with it.

Physically the SoundBridge is pretty good looking: a sliver and black ten inch cylinder about two inches in diameter, with a large LCD panel on the front. When turned on it found my wireless network, asked for the WEP key, and promptly upgraded its firmware. Once all that was done, it let me select from two libraries: Vicky's Music or Internet Radio. Vicky was running iTunes on her laptop which exports the library over DAAP, so I listened to Tori Amos whilst I explored the Internet Radio options. Then I listened to the most excellent Groove Salad on SomaFM (apparently the #4 station on the Roku Radio charts). At this point I discovered that there was a SoundBridge link in Epiphany, the SoundBridge uses mDNS to publish the web control panel: a useful application of clue from Roku. Then it just got better. The SoundBridge will stream from DAAP and UPnP servers (they pimp mt-daapd and SlimServer), and announces the web interface over mDNS and UPnP. There is a web site which indexes Internet radio streams, currently it has over 5000 entries. This site uses a Java applet (currently only tested in Windows though, I haven't installed Java yet) to talk to your SoundBridge so it can show the currently playing station and tell it to play another station. Then I discovered this in the manual.

Geeks - read this. The M-bridge has a command line interface that you can telnet to for piddling abut. You will need to telnet to port 4444. Type "?" at the command prompt to see a list of commands. ... M-bridge has a built-in UPnP AV "media renderer". This protocol can be used to control the M-bridge from your own software.

The SoundBridge supports both a custom protocol (documented in a 200-page PDF) and the standard UPnP protocol for controlling it. They even documented the signals the remote control uses. This is probably one of the most hackable "consumer" devices I've seen for a long time, short of the N800. Well done Roku, you've created a damn neat product which actually does just work out of the box.

NP: theJazz, Internet radio

11:15 Wednesday, 03 Oct 2007 [#] [life] (11 comments)

Posted by Thomas at Wed Oct 3 12:14:19 2007:
Hi,

i have a SoundBridge too and I am looking for a good matching NAS. Which one do you have and would you recommend it?

- Thomas
Posted by Ross at Wed Oct 3 12:22:45 2007:
I have a Thecus N2100 NAS and yes I'd recommend it.  I got the NAS and the SoundBridge in a bundle: the NAS is re-badged as an Evesham M-Box and comes with mt-daapd pre-installed. Last night I wiped the firmware and installed Debian, but I'll be installing mt-daapd again shortly.
Posted by Strass at Wed Oct 3 12:23:43 2007:
BTW, what kind of NAS did you choose ?
Posted by Strass at Wed Oct 3 12:24:20 2007:
Someone was faster than me...
Posted by fizze at Wed Oct 3 15:17:49 2007:
also be suer to check out www.fireflymediaserver.org  if you haven't already. Its a piece of software previously known as mt-daapd.
Works and builds on many NAS devices.

I use a Linksys NSLU2 and a SoundBridge since about 2 years. works like a charm.
Posted by David Holmes at Wed Oct 3 16:08:35 2007:
Ross:

"Well done Roku, you've created a damn neat product which actually does just work out of the box."

By this, I assume what you actually meant was:

"you've created a damn neat product which actually does just work out of the box, except when Apple decides to periodically screw you over by changing their undocumented proprietary protocol without warning us, as they have done in the past."

See <a href="http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9026&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0">http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9026&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0</a>

Of course this isn't at all Roku's fault, but it's certainly worth noting.  You can't count on Apple to support you.
Posted by David Holmes at Wed Oct 3 16:10:16 2007:
Also, there was no HTML around the URL, so I think whatever code in your comment system put it there is broken ;)
Posted by Ross at Wed Oct 3 16:14:59 2007:
Yeah, obviously the problem with DAAP is that Apple like changing it...  luckily I'll be running Firefly or FUPPES on the NAS. :)
Posted by Ian B at Thu Oct 4 00:58:48 2007:
I was just looking around for devices like this and if I'm not mistaken, Roku's only problem was that it doesn't do WPA. That may just be the "Soundbridge HomeMusic" unit though.
Posted by Ross at Thu Oct 4 07:27:29 2007:
Yes, I believe that is a limitation of the M500 only, the M1001 does WPA.  See http://www.rokulabs.com/products_compare.php.
Posted by David Mc Nally at Sat Jan 12 17:32:58 2008:
Just to clarify, in case people like me find the post via Google, the M500 does indeed do WPA. I've installed two M500's in the last three months and after the initial firmware upgrade they support WPA. Turn off WPA, hook up the M500, let it upgrade the firmware (twice), turn on WPA and set up the M500 to use it. :)

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