I noticed that a company is making a networked home music player that supports all the major music formats including aac (atleast itunes form of it). It does not support music bought from iTunes, however.

The formats it supports are MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis. So it looks like everyone gets a little something from this unit. Lossless compressed, loosy compressed, and uncompressed wav.

I like the fact that there software is open sourced and that the unit has a display so I don't have to have my TV on to use it (in fact there is not video conector on the unit).

Here is the website for more info

http://www.rokulabs.com/products/soundbrid...dex.php

I have been looking for a home unit to play music on my home stereo for a long time. As of right now I have a 75 foot rca cable sending the digital out of my soundcard to my stereo reciever. I keep tripping over the cable when I walk down the hall way! Since I have ethernet next to my stereo rack and my computer is already hooked to the network in it's room, I can cut the cable.

Anyone else been waiting for an aac compatable unit like this?

(sorry for the edits, I messed up the link)

What does this offer that the Squeezebox doesn't have (at $25 less)?

hmmm, looks pretty much the same, I like the Ruko's looks better, but $25 is enough to forget the look of it. I have been looking for something like this for some time. Now I know of two. How many other units like these are out there, and why isn't there any protables (besides ipod)?

Thanks Mono for the info!

That is the only one I know of, but likely there are more. As for portables, there are lots of threads on this subforum discussing various non-iPod AAC players.

Slimp3/Squeezebox doesn't hardware decode AAC. Instead, you have to have
LAME installed on your PC or Mac to transcode and then stream the MP3. It says
so on their website. I also own the original SLIMP3 and it definitely can't handle
AAC in any form unless it first transcodes it on the fly using LAME.

Sean

You're right, it must be transcoded. But it can be transcoded to PCM (no compression), according to the website.

EDIT: previous wording may have seemed mean-spirited.

You should note that the open-source Slim Server mentioned on the Roku web site is the same as as the server developed by Slim Devices, Inc (makers of the Squeezebox & SLIMP3).

As of right now, Roku has not contributed anything (code or otherwise) back to Slim Devices. We'll see what happens when an actual product materializes.

Yesterday afternoon I went ahead and ordered a squeezebox. I should have it on Friday, just in time for the three-day holiday weekend here in the US. Now I wont have to worry about my druken friends ripping the audio cable I have been using to connect my computer to the stereo

Mono: I have read many posts on portables, but I haven't found one that supports aac out of the box. Are there some threads that talk about hacks to current portable players that I might have missed?

This is correct in that we do not decode AAC in hardware. But you do not need LAME installed, nor do you need to stream MP3, if you are using a Squeezebox.

The default behavior with a Squeezebox is we decompress AAC audio through Quicktime, and send an uncompressed stream from the server to the Squeezebox.

The SliMP3 was our first player, which we started shipping in 2001. It did not support uncompressed audio, so you do have to transcode AAC to MP3 on the fly with that player.

So does this mean that you can support any audio format that Quicktime can play?

Yes, but there might be a bit of work involved to support any metadata.

I'm curious what format you were thinking of - the Squeezebox already supports wav, aiff, flac, shorten, apple lossless, mp3, vorbis, musepack, aac and wma.

Nothing in particular; I was just curious.

Edit: Wait, so then why can't you play back AAC files purchased from the iTunes Music Store? They can be decoded in Quicktime and sent to the Roku, yeah?

Hmmm... Does the squeezebox support WMA lossless?

1. At one time you could - but it was never official support and Apple closed this particular hole with the iTunes 4.5 release. But the simple answer is you can't play them because Apple doesn't want you to play them.

2. As long as the squeezebox server computer supports playing back wma lossless, the squeezebox should as well. It hooks into the windows media framework for decoding and playback. If you're interested in the program used, look here.