Wonky Gibbon Ramblings

After much agonising over DAB and various Internet Streaming devices, I recently bought a Revo Mondo Wireless Network Internet Radio Streaming device.

And it’s very liberating – I find myself listening to all sorts of new radio I would never have got around to finding before.

Obviously you can listen to streamed radio from all over the world, all the various “Listen Again” items on the various BBC Radio sites, plus play mp3 and other audio media stored elsewhere on my home network.

Network sharing of mp3 media was a major reason for getting the device. The standard way the Revo Mondo does this is for you to navigate to the network share where your mp3’s are stored. It then scans them and stores a cache index file away on that network share so that the process is quicker next time around. All of which is quite nice (if you don’t know any better).

But having to grant write access to the network share just so that the Radio streamer can store its cache file is clearly arse. There has to be a better way…

Which is where UPnP comes in because the Revo Mondo has another neat trick up it’s sleave – it can also talk to any box on your network that advertises itself as a UPnP server.

Of course, here at the Gibbon School of Tree Swinging, I haven’t the foggiest what UPnP means? Google tells me it stands for “Universal Plug n Play”. So that clears that up. Pfff – err no – none the wiser really.

So after a bit of research – I found out what a UPnP Server is supposed to do. It finds or hooks up to existing indexes of media files on the machine on which it is installed and then allows that index and the files within it to be served/streamed to other machines.

So for example, if you use Windows Media Player on your file server, it will already have indexed the mp3 files. On the Mac, similarly iTunes will have done the same thing.

So by adding (the right) UPnP component to your media serving machine, you can share the media and any playlists already set up on it with the Revo Mondo without it having to do any more indexing or file writing. Which is really nice.

More information on UPnP and UPnP server software can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPnP_AV_MediaServers

As a Windows user, I was most interested in the Windows Media Connect (WMC) component that does this.

For Media Player 10 it can be downloaded for free from Microsoft from here:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/7/A/47AA030D-4070-4D2E-B1B8-1CF92CB4F29F/wmcsetup.exe
or
http://download.chip.eu/en/Windows-Media-Connect-2.0_116694.html

Media Player 11 has it built in – you just need to enable it. Instructions in this blog on that:
http://ingtes.blogspot.com/2007/02/enabling-upnp-services-in-windows.html

More information from on Media Sharing by Microsoft can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/faq/sharing.mspx

In terms of the Revo Mondo itself – it’s a pretty good device. Sound quality is good given that the data is streamed and despite the small screen size, navigating radio stations is pretty easy (either by location or by genre). However the screen size is a problem with UPnP. Navigating large mp3 collections is a bit of a pig, and that’s assuming you’ve editted all the mp3 tags so that the namings are consistent (even worse if not). But all in all – a good looking well priced device.