After I had ripped most of our CD collection to a spare drive on my Mac, my wife asked the next logical question - "So how can I listen to this down in the living room?" I didn't have a good answer for her until recently. On the advice of a friend, I checked out the Turtle Beach Audiotron.
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.
;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
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020226002933610