Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Wireless Music - Music at Home Minus the Cables
by Andrew Ku on August 8, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Sound Blaster Wireless Music - Cordless Setup
The Sound Blaster Wireless Music system is fairly simple. It basically consists of a receiver (requires the included power adapter), Creative Labs' wireless music software bundle, and RF Remote.Click to enlarge. |
Click to enlarge. |
The software bundle behind the Wireless Music system includes Creative's MediaSource, Wireless Music Software (server and console components), and the Wireless Music driver, all of which automatically install via the CD. We already had MediaSource pre-installed from our Jukebox Zen Xtra review, and we noticed that this would make our Wireless Music installation slightly off skew.
After the automatic installation and subsequent restart, MediaSource is supposed to launch and prompt for audio tracks to import, as programmed. This didn't happen in our case because MediaSource was preinstalled, so we had to uninstall the program and then install the software package for the Sound Blaster Wireless Music.
Click to enlarge. |
Click to enlarge. |
Click to enlarge. |
Click to enlarge. |
Click to enlarge. |
Click to enlarge. |
The only other thing that needs to be configured is the receiver, which can be connected automatically to your wireless network, assuming that you have a single wireless network and don't have WEP enabled. While most home users have a single wireless network, they do have some level of WEP encryption enabled, which means that the receiver will need to be configured manually in these cases.
Establishing the wireless network settings for the receiver is as simple as hooking up the receiver to the computer with the software installed and running the networking wizard. The only thing that we noticed is that installing the server software on two computers and trying to set up the receiver would make it fail the networking setup wizard test. It is possible to have up to 4 receivers on a single network with one remote that controls them or remotes assigned to each receiver. This multi-receiver capability, however, seems to be enabled only when you have more than one receiver actually present to set up.
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dalhtech - Tuesday, August 10, 2004 - link
A big difference between this device and the airport express is that you can't control what's being played from the Airport Express with the Airport Express. If the computer is in room A, and the airport express and stereo are in room B, you have to travel from room B where you are listening to music to room A to change the playing track.Airport Express needs a remote.
EdvardGrieg - Tuesday, August 10, 2004 - link
If you can find one, the Turtle Beach Audiotron will scan for network shares and use those.outlaws42 - Tuesday, August 10, 2004 - link
The Squeezebox from slimDevices uses opensource server softwarejohnsonx - Sunday, August 8, 2004 - link
Does anyone know of a media player that doesn't require their proprietary server software to be running?I'd like to find one that can just pull media files from a Windows (CIFS) or Linux (NFS) share.
diehlr - Sunday, August 8, 2004 - link
Seems to me that the Airport Express does this and a whole lot more for a whole let less money.at80eighty - Sunday, August 8, 2004 - link
HECK! dunno how the double post happened!!didint even press 'post' yet!!
anyway - ive been planning on picking one of these to accompany my new rig - Cnet had reviewed this product, but i wanted to know what my fave HW site had to say about it!
thx a bunch for the review!
but the 2.1. support sux : /.. i was hoping to use this to stream to my Bose Lifestyle system for pretty much all my uses *ahem*read* games : p
Andrew, any input of this? (forgive me if this is a stupid question : p)
thnx in adv!
at80eighty - Sunday, August 8, 2004 - link
GREAT!