Roku wins

Before you read this post, read the next one down first.

So I bought the Roku Soundbridge M1001 at Best Buy on sale for $200. Once I had the device connected to my home theatre receiver and plugged it in, the next step was to configure the wireless networking. It found my wireless network right away and after entering my WEP key, was now a client on my network.

The next thing I had to do was install Windows Media Connect. Microsoft doesn't make this software easy to find now because it's built into Media Player 11, but with a little Googling, I found it. Once Media Connect is running, it's a simple matter of sharing out your mp3 folder(s) and then you should have full access to your mp3 collection on the Soundbridge. I had a Windows firewall issue, but documentation on Roku's site solved that problem.

It works! I only had one more thing to set up. The Soundbridge works best if you have playlists already stored in the shared folder (it can use playlists to catalogue all your music), so I opened Winamp, created a playlist (m3u file) of every song I had, called it "Everything" and saved it in the same folder as the rest of my songs. The Soundbridge found it no problem. I just opened the playlist, played the first song, hit the shuffle button on the remote and walked away. If you want to skip a song, you just hit the skip button. Otherwise, you can search by song, artist, or album. The sound is very good too.

I may be getting another one for upstairs.