Comment Re:Software/Hardware to make my own (Score 1) 109
For our New Year's party I used a wireless laptop that nfs-mounted a big mp3 collection from a server and used xmms with a playlist generated with grave.
Most of the tunes were encoded at 256K. Looking at network traffic, the wireless channel would be quiet for 4 seconds, then the player would move 50 packets in the 5th second, then quiet for 4 more seconds, and so on. Interesting pattern that illustrates nfs read-ahead.
The Sonos device is different in several respects. The main ones are the gui/controls, the mesh network, and audio quality. I met the Sonos people last year and they are audio geeks. My tunes would sound much better on their box than my laptop. They have time synch and streaming in their network whereas the nfs hack has nothing of the kind and depends on readahead bandwidth. The control system speaks for itself. My family could easily use it whereas I have to be present to get the nfs hack setup (and debugged if needed).
Most of the tunes were encoded at 256K. Looking at network traffic, the wireless channel would be quiet for 4 seconds, then the player would move 50 packets in the 5th second, then quiet for 4 more seconds, and so on. Interesting pattern that illustrates nfs read-ahead.
The Sonos device is different in several respects. The main ones are the gui/controls, the mesh network, and audio quality. I met the Sonos people last year and they are audio geeks. My tunes would sound much better on their box than my laptop. They have time synch and streaming in their network whereas the nfs hack has nothing of the kind and depends on readahead bandwidth. The control system speaks for itself. My family could easily use it whereas I have to be present to get the nfs hack setup (and debugged if needed).
