Hello all,

I considered a SoundBridge M1000/M1001 and the SqueezeBox 3 for quite awhile, weighing both heavily. I ultimately decided on the Roku because of the cost and because of native Apple Lossless (ALAC) support. Native ALAC is huge for me.

I received my Roku yesterday, not intending to have "time" to set it up and play around with it until sometime during the weekend. I decided to at least unbox it and plug it into power and audio. Little did I know that this would be *ALL* I have to do!

After a quick and painless firmware upgrade, the SoundBridge detected my iTunes server and my UPnP server. I chose the iTunes one and was streaming ALAC-encoded albums over my Wi-Fi network with no gaps, drops, rebuffers, anything. All and all, less than 10 minutes to have the thing working properly.

I will note that my iTunes server is hardwired, so the half duplex nature of wireless is not causing me any problems. I have a feeling lossless streaming might not work so well otherwise.

I'm an open source engineer and work with complex systems at work every day. I have about 80 Linux machines to babysit, so I *love* when I can go home at night and have stuff just work.

I will also say that the fact that the SqueezeBox does Pandora really leaned me towards their product, but that single feature wasn't enough to justify twice the cost. I am REALLY hoping that something between Roku and Pandora is in the works.

Anyway, kudos to the Roku team for making my life a little less hectic.

Great report! Welcome, and surf over to Control/Integration for neat tools to manage SB over lan/wlan. FWIW, I don't use lossless, but see regular reports that it works well over wlan provided you have a strong signal (relatively close to your router) and almost no neighbor interference. G'Luck!

wideasleep1 wrote:

FWIW, I don't use lossless, but see regular reports that it works well over wlan provided you have a strong signal (relatively close to your router) and almost no neighbor interference. G'Luck!

I concur. I use FLAC, transcoded to WAV on the server and sent to 2 SoundBridges wirelessly. You need to be diligent about the use of channels, and other bandwidth use on your own WiFi network. I did a survey last week and found I could see 12 other networks from my location - but with careful choice of channel, taking into account the reported relative strength of other networks and the built-in overlap of the WiFi channels means that it all works well for me.

....and if you *really* want pandora on the SB you can make it happen. There is a post on here somewhere about it. It does mean running pandora on the PC and running icecast and oddcast in the background. Once set up works well. The icecast/oddcast setup actually re-streams *any* audio on the PC out on to your LAN (and onto the WAN if you uncheck one of the settings!)

mr rusty wrote:

....and if you *really* want pandora on the SB you can make it happen. There is a post on here somewhere about it. It does mean running pandora on the PC and running icecast and oddcast in the background. Once set up works well. The icecast/oddcast setup actually re-streams *any* audio on the PC out on to your LAN (and onto the WAN if you uncheck one of the settings!)

Or simply run Winamp with Shoutcast DSP plugin to create your own lan radio station...same thing, a little lighter weight/less work than above.

Im a mac user, so I believe my options are limited to a $50 shareware app. Since my PC is on the second floor and my Roku will be in my basement listening room, it seems like it wouldn't be worth it. I'm hoping for native Pandora support someday soon.

I not sure what your goal is; listening to Pandora (which has ceased streaming to outside of US) or just to control the songs played on the Soundbridge from the computer. If it's the latter you could try http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ which also should work on Mac. See my post here: http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13301 There might also be other solutions (for Mac) that I'm not aware of.