One could assume that Steve Job’s had an impact on developers, if it wasn’t that the speech itself was a simple reflection of the trends within the electronic industry: With fast networking and even faster IO ports such as FireWire becoming the norm in personal computing, the doors of creativity for an innovative engineering team were now wide open, and many answered the call, not just Apple.

Three weeks ago, I came across a small mention for a new product released by Slim Devices Inc, and read its description on the corporate web site with great interest.

Slim Devices is a small San Jose, CA, company driven by the sacred fire of entrepreneurship, and with their first product offering, the SliMP3 players, goes all the way to make sure that quality and ease of use were delivered. They take well deserved pride in their work – the web site even has some candid picture of early prototype and the manufacturing process.

The market – consumers and reviewers alike – can be merciless when it comes to a product being hyped beyond what it actually delivers. I am not exempt: I have become allergic to bold promises made in press releases never being integrated in the final release, or being implemented in such a clumsy fashion as to be practically unusable. As a Mac user, I expect my tools to perform, and to have a convivial interface that make them easy to use – yet to include powerful features.

And so, I called Slim Devices, and spoke to Sean, who was kind enough to send a unit over to me. Feeling like a child on Christmas eve, I stood by the door and waited for the mailman – or in the case, the Man from Brown – and salivated enough to make a doberman envious. Yet, because of past experience, I fully expected to be disappointed.

Sean, hard at work on some of the original prototype components.

I got the box from the man in brown, and in less than half an hour SliMP3 was blasting some Barenaked Ladies in the lounge, piped from the upstairs office.

The SliMP3 is a refreshing exception to mediocrity; Small and unobtrusive, elegant and stylish, it does exactly what it claims to do, and once properly installed and configured (a ten minute job) melts in the background to work its magic.

One word: Cool!

The Official Blurb

“The SliMP3 (Slim-’pE-’thrE) is an MP3 player that streams music over Ethernet from your PC. It features a powerful, easy-to-use, hierarchical browser interface, allowing you to quickly browse through your music collection from the convenience of a remote control. Its large vacuum fluorescent display is bright and readable, and the sound quality is second to none. SliMP3 gives you the convenience of enjoying music in any room of your home – thanks to its small form factor, you easily place it in your stereo cabinet, on a shelf, or even on your bed-side table. Standard RCA outputs let you connect it directly to any stereo receiver. Imagine enjoying your MP3 collection on those big speakers in your living room, away from the distractions of fans and hard drives.

“This is not just another bare-bones PC, dressed up as a HiFi component – it is an entirely original design, from its unique user interface to its revolutionary microcontroller-based Ethernet/IP architecture. The hardware and firmware were designed by Slim Devices specifically for high speed embedded Internet applications, including multimedia streaming, data acquisition, remote control, and surveillance. The SliMP3, our first product, combines this embedded Internet architecture with our open-source MP3 server to bring you this most elegant and useful Internet appliance.”

Comparative Study

The SliMP3 is a nice concept: Instead of connecting to an Internet server to listen to someone else’s idea of cool music, why not tap into your computer resources and your collection of MP3? And, instead of listening to these tunes on your Mac’s usually less than proficient speakers, why not use your sound system, with ample power and high sound quality?

Think of the SliMP3 as a remote control for your songs. You can browse, and play, any song available in your Mac’s music library, control everything – with a REMOTE! – from the comfort of your couch. Play from playlists, or random by artists, genre, album, or shuffle your whole collection.

I recently gave away my CD carousel because my DVD player supports MP3 CDR – and five audio CDs in shuffle mode cannot compete with twelve hours of MP3 on one CDR in random play. It remains that a CDR is 650-700MB – and I have 50Gb of hard drive storage on my Mac.

One could always buy an iPod and connect it to the sound system. That’s fine, but it demands the transfer of your music files from your Mac to the iPod. Furthermore, while this amazing handheld device serves its purpose very well, it was designed as a hand held device and browsing files with an iPod tethered to your sound system isn’t practical.

While the iPod is a great way to listen to MP3s on the go, it remains a generally egotistical device, and not necessarily the center of your next dance party.

Compare that to the large LED display of the SliMP3, the remote control, the ergonomic user interface, and you’ll see why it is a superior solution. The $249 SRP makes it attractive to those who would like to use their sound system to play MP3s, but do not wish to shell out $299-$499 for an iPod.

For the difference, you can add a large ATA hard drive and have, not hours, not days but WEEKS of never-repeating music online.

Setting Up

There are two components to the SliMP3: The player, connected to your sound system, and the server software that runs on your Mac. It is worth noting that the server software is entirely Open Source, and that the PERL source codes are available on Slim Devices’ web site. There is already a strong community building around it, and Slim Devices has taken great care to integrate in new software releases some of the best improvements made to the code by creative participants. For instance, the latest version of the SliMP3 server can integrate with your iTunes database – not to mention the small Tetris- and Defender-like games you can play on the device.

If you already have a home LAN extending to the area where your audio components are installed, setting everything up will take only a few minutes.

Connect the player to your tuner or amp using the provided RCA cables; connect also the RJ45 network cable to your LAN; plug the power supply into an outlet and to the player. That’s it.

The player is essentially a dumb terminal, driven entirely server-side. The interface it displays is sent over from the server. In an Open Source context where you have access to the program’s code lines, it also means that a good PERL programmer could use it to display other type of information as well (News tickers, stock quotes, or anything, really) while it plays the MP3s…

But the server is also intelligent enough when time comes to set it up: If your LAN is set with DHCP service, it can appropriate an IP address and look for the server on your network all by itself. Or, if you desire, you can assign static IPs for both parameters.

Designed by an ex Apple engineer who obviously had usability in mind, the SliMP3 remote control interface uses a tree of simple menus to navigate your music library. There are four ways to view your song collection:

• Browse files as you have them on your computer (Music Library);
• Browse by ID3 tags information, by Genres, Artists or Albums;
• Browse playlist built with iTune or with the server’s web browser interface;
• Search you collection for Songs, Artists or Album

You will not be able to do that until you have installed, launched and properly configured the server, though.

Download the latest version of the software from the Slim Devices web site, decompress it, and place it wherever you want on your hard drive. Launch the application, click START, and then click WEB ACCESS to set it up.

This will open your web browser and display a simple, split-frame page. You can also connect to the server interface directly from your web browser by using the URL .

Click on the SERVER SETTINGS link and follow the instructions to pick your language and tell the server where your MP3 files are located. It will spend a few minutes building a cached index of your files, and that’s it for basic setup.

Aside for letting you lower or crank up the volume all the way up to “11″ (an homage to Spinal Tap, no doubt) the web interface lets you control your player remotely – shuffle or not, repeat one, all or none, songs being played, in queue, or even stopping the player altogether. If your LAN includes any Airport-enabled devices, you could control everything from anywhere at all, from the basement to poolside, simply by using your web browser.

There are more parameters that you can configure to your own pleasure, from the level of brightness of the player when on and off (it displays the date and time when powered down) to the display behavior in NOW PLAYING mode: You can even create your own custom strings for the songs info displays.

The web interface includes a clear and fairly detailed guide to all settings and setups.

I named my player “Fridoline.” Seen here with Soul/R&B in shuffle mode.

Using the Player and Remote

The package comes with a Sony RM-V201 universal remote that can be used to control other audio and video components as well, though you may be in trouble if you already have a JVC DVD player in the same room, since the SliMP3 uses the same command signals. detailed instructions are included, both for preparing the remote for use with the device and for assigning three other devices to the remaining TV, VCR and CBL/SAT buttons. It’s a nice touch to have a remote-controlled device decrease, not increase, the quantity of remotes in my living room.

Easy as pie: To configure the IR remote for the sliMP3, press “S, DVD, 0, 0, 7, ENT, DVD” and you are done.

You can now browse your music collection. Use the Up and DOWN arrows to select the type of operation – BROWSE BY GENRE, for example. Use the RIGHT and LEFT arrows to zoom in and our of details: GENRE <->ARTIST<->ALBUM<->SONG. Press PLAY to play a song immediately, or press the RECORD button to add a song to the playlist queue. The OK button is used to control playlist shuffle.

Adding songs one by one to a playlist could be clumsy and inefficient, so there is a better way: You can press PLAY or RECORD at any given point to add ALL the subdirectory to the playlist. Press PLAY when at the top of the ROCK genre, or ABBA, or GREATEST HITS OF LOOLAPALOOZA, and the whole content will be added: All you rock songs, or ABBA collection, or the whole album. You decide if the content should play in order or be randomly shuffled.

Setting and Saving Playlists

The single drawback I found with the device is that there is no way to edit and save persistent playlists from the player. It can only be done from the server web interface, with iTunes playlist integration coming soon, hopefully with server version 3.0b2. If one could find a tool or a script to parse iTunes playlists to .m3u or .pls format, these could probably be used, but until then the options are limited.

Not that it is hard to do: browse your file with your web browser in the same way as above, and click on the ADD TO PLAYLIST button to do just that. Make sure that you have selected a folder to save playlists in the server settings, and click SAVE PLAYLIST when ready. You can add or remove songs in a playlist in edit mode – but you cannot reorder the songs.

Audio Quality

I listened hard for hiss and buzz: None were to be found unless part of the recording. Sound quality is excellent, and matches any CD player out there. Of course, the level of quality of your MP3 encoding will have an impact – but the SliMP3 does not distort the resulting audio.

Listening to a live comedy show, made out of an MP3 files for every act and skit, granted me a pleasant boon: NO GAP!

I had not noticed previously because many MP3s have silences built into the file, both before and after: There are no pauses between the songs. So while it does not have the crossfading ability of iTunes (which isn’t always a good thing), I found that music mixed and merged in a very natural fashion and made the whole listening experience very enjoyable.

No fans and no moving parts also means no noise pollution. You can listen to the Goldberg Variations without any distraction.

Conclusion

I could expand at nauseam on the pleasures of using this little box, but will spare you. instead, suffice to say it provided me with a great motivation to clean a LOT of hard drive space and start ripping CDs to MP3 at a serious pace. So far I am at 7GB, and increasing daily.

The SliMP3 does what it claims to do, and does it very well. The Open Source aspect is not to be neglected, since it enables a host of possibilities, far beyond the R&D resources of a small innovative company, and some of these creations will no doubt be integrated in future releases of the software.

The $249 pricetag may seem as a bit high, yet it compares favorably to that of similar devices or any quality audio component. That Slim Devices made no compromise to the quality of their product to achieve a lower cost is a brave decision considering the current market, but one that pays off in the final result. High quality comes at a cost – and in this case, is well worth it.

Digital lifestyle – Here I come!