So what's an Audiotron, you may be asking? The Audiotron is, in a nutshell, a networked MP3 player. The device has no hard drive, no fan, and it's designed to look like a standard piece of audio gear so it will fit right into your existing rack. It includes both analog and TOSlink fiber optic digital outputs. You plug in a 10-base-T cable, a power cord, and then connect the thing to your stereo system. Just like that, your entire MP3 collection is available through your stereo.
How is this related to OS X? Event though Turtle Beach disclaims any Mac support, the Audiotron works just fine with OS X (via a Samba server). After some initial snags, some help from a key web page had our Audiotron up and running without any further difficulties.
Brief editorial aside: I truly think this is the future of home audio, at least in some respects. With the Audiotron installed, we now have a catalog of 2,300+ songs (the machine can handle 30,000+, according to the specs) available at the touch of a few buttons. No more getting up to grab another CD for the player, forgetting where you put the CD you wanted to hear right now, etc. Just thousands of songs, always available as long as my Mac is up and running! I think the Audiotron (and SonicBlue's similar device) are just the tip of the iceberg in this product category.
Read the rest of the article for a summary of the steps required to get an Audiotron working with OS X...
As much as I'd like to take credit for this hint myself, I really can't. My first attempts at setting up the Audiotron were quite frustrating. Sometimes it would find the Samba server, sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes the song list would start downloading and then stop, other times it would claim there were no songs available. After only a bit of digging on the web, however, I found Paul Guthrie's excellent OS X / Audiotron page. Here in one location is everything you need to get up and running. Since I can't improve on Paul's write up, I'll just summarize a few key points here.
- Make sure you have a Samba server installed and running before you start. You'll save yourself much aggravation. I already had Samba serving our MP3 collection to my wife's PC before I started the Audiotron project.
- I don't believe a PC is required in any way, but I can't say for certain. I used the PC setup program to initial the internal web browser, but this may be possible from the front panel as well (I haven't read that far yet!). Paul's page doesn't mention the need for a PC, so I doubt one is required.
- Follow Paul's advice on settings for the server and shares within Samba. I had trouble maintaining a connection before I switched my settings to match his recommendations. After adjusting the settings, I can't get the player to skip downstairs, even while playing Quake3 on my Mac! This was the heaviest network load I could think of to test for stuttering in the player under difficult conditions. Just in case Paul's page ever goes away, here are the tweak lines I added to (in 10.2) /etc/smb.conf:
;No skipping settings:
Note: The "socket options line is shown on two rows; enter it as one line with a space replacing the line break.
max xmit = 65536
read size = 1024
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_KEEPALIVE
SO_RCVBUF=2048 SO_SNDBUF=2048 IPTOS_LOWDELAY
dead time = 15
getwd cache = yes - I found it easiest to use SWAT to make the changes in Samba. If you do this, you'll need to show "Advanced settings" for both globals and shares in order to see all the options you'll need to configure.
- I set the Audiotron to use a static IP address. This seemed to help it make faster and more solid network connections, but I can't prove that statistically.
- If you're using an iTunes library, make sure you follow the tip at the end of Paul's page for converting your MP3 tags to a format that the Audiotron can read. The conversion is relatively speedy, taking only a minute or so to convert all 2,300+ songs in the library.
There are two principle products that I'm aware of in the "networked MP3 player" space right now. In addition to the Audiotron, SonicBlue makes the Rio Receiver. The Rio is much cheaper ($160 vs. $299), and has quite a different design philosophy. It's also a "Windows only" product, but there is a UNIX version of the control program available (a Perl script, no less!) which runs on OS X. Where the Rio unit does everything on the host (playlists, indexes, groups, etc.), the Audiotron does everything on the receiver itself. The Rio software, since it's third party, is open source and can be modified by anyone with knowledge of Perl. The Audiotron software is closed, but there are firmware upgrades available. The Auditron also includes the digital output, and is designed to fit in with a traditional stereo stack.
In the end, I chose the Audiotron due to its nicer display, integrated web server, more professional look, lack of need for Perl knowledge ;-), and digital output. The Rio unit is also a good choice, and will be even nicer if a friend of mine releases the modified Perl script he's created. It's much more generic than the present script, and will probably handle iTunes libraries just fine. I'll post a blurb if and when he makes the software available.

