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| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: Cisco-Linksys Wireless-B Music System WMLS11B | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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User Submitted Cisco-Linksys Wireless-B Music System WMLS11B Reviews (cont...)Date: 2005-07-10 Works like a charm but room for improvement This device does what it is advertised to do: serve music over a wireless network. I had no difficulties setting up with a Netgear wireless router and encryption. The whole process took maybe 20 minutes, but only because I was carefully double-checking the progress at every step. My only complaint is that the interface has a mildly awkward menu system, but it's easy to get used to. There's a nice option to browse by Artist / (sub-menus) Album, which is perfect if you just want to play a particular album. You can also choose to play all saved tracks from a single artist (based on tags), or your whole collection. In those cases, the default is to play the tracks in alphabetical order by tag-title, but you can select a shuffle mode for random selection of tracks. The device is very portable and is easy to connect to a receiver. Shame that it can't be powered by batteries; the extra portability would have been handy! Date: 2005-07-08 The only real drawback is the speakers I saw this item advertised somewhere and immediately fell in love with the idea. My wife must have taken the hint and got it for me as an anniversary-slash-father's-day gift. Once she showed me the receipt for it (since the actual item hadn't arrived in time), I was pretty psyched and checked out what others on Amazon had to say about it. Needless to say, I was a little crestfallen after reading user reviews... it hasn't received great reviews. However, most of the poor reviews seemed to come from people who are, how should I put this, not so technically inclined, so I hoped that I would be happier with it, given my networking skills, etc. I'm very happy to say I am. I love this product. First and foremost, you need to hardwire this thing to your network and update the firmware. No question about it. Everything I've read says that this fixes most problems straightaway. (The same can be said about most home-use networking appliances). Once I updated the firmware and configured the network settings (advice: use a static IP address), I haven't had any major crashes outside of the occasional reboot after (very) extended play. The wireless connection has also been nearly flawless everwhere in and out of my house. Secondly, don't bother with the packaged software... MusicMatch kills system performance, and I don't care to sign up for any "trials". Instead, download WinAmp and TwonkyVision. Matter of fact, I'm not even so sure you need WinAmp for anything other than creating playlists? I rip my CDs using Microsoft Media Player (make sure you rip them as 128K MP3s, *NOT* WMAs). I keep TwonkyVision in my startup folder so as long as my computer is on and I'm logged in, I can listen to my CDs or Internet Radio. As it turns out, I never really planned on listening to Internet Radio, but I have found that TwonkyVision finds a TON of stations, categorized by genres (not always the correct genre however... you should hear what they call "80's Hair Metal"). I love the comedy stations... prank calls, Richard Pryor... awesome! Now, as for the device itself, it's very sharp looking. The menus are a little on the kludgy side, but the display is clear. The remote does need to be pretty much pointing directly at the unit. As I wrote in my title, the speakers are a little on the weak side, but what can you expect? However, many similar devices have no speakers at all, so the portability of this unit is awesome... I loved having it outside with me while I reshingled my porch! It's also great out on the deck while I'm cooking on the grill. Usually, though, it's in my living room or bedroom. Don't know if I'd want to expose it to the moisture of the bathroom, although I'd love to be able to listen to it while I was showering and getting ready for work, etc. I also haven't tried hooking it into my receiver yet, because I really don't have a decent one upstairs, and if I'm downstairs in my office, I'm on my computer and don't really need the Linksys. So, in summary: Great product, well worth the money. Can be a little tricky for non-techie types to really get the most out of it, and needs some tweaking out of the box, but it's not that tough. The speakers are both a huge advantage (portability), and conversely its only real shortcoming in my case, but if you're going to hook it up to a receiver, then you needn't concern yourself with them. I had planned only to listen to my CDs through the Linksys, but in the end, I probably use it for Internet Radio twice as much as I listen to CDs (which I've already heard a million times anyway). As a side note, a guy I work with who's a rabid audiophile mentioned that he has one of these also and loves it. He's got it hooked up to his system and says it's fantastic. Date: 2005-05-05 Awesome! Problems mentioned below must be fixed. I purchased this product even though I had read several reviews where people were having problems here on Amazon. My thoughts were "if these problems haven't been fixed, I'll take it back." I'm happy to say that I've experienced NONE of the problems that some of the users below have experienced. As one of the other reviewers below said "many of the problems are fixed with the 1.0.9 Firmware." I've not had any problems reported below such as 1) Can't play more than 10 songs on a playlist 2) skipping songs 3) Low wireless signal strength (the unit picks up in the back of my house where my laptop's wireless card won't!!!) I've had NO skipping and I've now got over 50 CD's on my media server with varying numbers of songs on them and have NO problems selecting them from the panel interface. I basically, powered the unit on and it discovered my wireless network and I was playing Internet radio stations within 10 minutes of having it out of the box. Upgrade to the 1.0.9 before you do ANYTHING else. Now, I am using mine in a slightly different way that I've read about others using theirs. My whole point in buying this was to use either Musicmatch's On-Demand or Rhapsody's unlimited streaming downloads for $9.99 a month. I don't have massive colletions of downloaded mp3's that I want to play. I simply want to use one of these services to store playlists and access those albums from across the house. Here is WHERE I HAD PROBLEMS BUT OVERCAME THEM. I started with Musicmatch 8.2 that came on the Linksys CD and is supposedly the only server that is compatible with the linksys unit. The Linksys immediately say the server I had the 8.2 software on and was able to access the Playlists I had created (again, not Playlists of songs that I had actually downloaded but Playlists that I could stream to my system). Unfortunately, this FLAT didn't work. I could see the songs on my Linksys but they just wouldn't play. I think its the format that MusicMatch streams them from their site in. On a whim, I decided to download Rhapsody and try their equivalent. Nothing in the Linksys manual implied that you could do anything with Rhapsody other than access their radio stations. However, when I got it installed (either 2.1 or 3.0 works) I noticed that it was acting as a UPnP server. Looking at my Linksys, I saw that it now saw another Media Player on the network. I created a few Playlists on Rhapsody and hit the button on the Linksys.....THEY PLAYED. Rhapsody works with this box but I COULD NOT make Musicmatch's On-Demand work. I bet it works great pushing songs you've purchased. Oh, one other trick, when you add songs to your Rhapsody Playlist, you need to stop and start your Rhapsody software and power cycle the Linksys for it to see those updates. It takes mere seconds. As for the unit itself the speakers are only slightly better than what you would expect from an "under the counter kitchen radio". In my small bathroom and even in the kitchen, they put out a decent amount of sound but won't ROCK. Get your expectations right and you won't be dissapointed. The unit itself is pretty light and "plasticy" but still looks sharp in my opinion. I hooked it up to my stero speakers and it ROCKED. For under $100, this is an AWESOME unit that really works. I'm looking to buy another one. Its cool to have a box that can play Internet radio stations alone...no to mention I can access Rhapsody and have unlimited albums for $8.33 a month paid quarterly. Wow! Date: 2005-03-13 Cool look just doesnt work! Music Match is very slow in loading and hangs by every startup. The player doesnt stream music well at all no matter what bitrate or firmware version. Once you go into a sub menu you must go all the way the the first menu to get out. Volume on the included speakers is horrible. I just bought the entire Rockford Fosgate Package AWESOME! Date: 2005-03-10 Buy this if you like to be tortured I bought the WMLS11B for my teenage daughter for christmas for her to play her music collection on our computer from her room. This seemed like a really cool idea and I was looking forward to tinkering with it. After following the setup directions I could not get the box to recognize any of the WMAs or MP3s on my music servers (Music Matchbox) or to play internet radio, even though I could quite easily access the WMLS11B remotely via the web-based admin tools. I endured endless torture trying to reach and communicate with the Linksys "technical support" personnel but I won't provide the gruesome details. I'll only mention a few highlights: 1) I spent over 7 hours with Linksys support (most of that was spent on hold, waiting to talk to somebody) 2) Linksys apparently outsources their technical support to India and uses a voice over IP line for the phone connection. It was very difficult to understand them, both because of their accent and because of the poor phone connection 3) The sum total of the technical knowledge of these people seemed to be limited to what is printed on the 2-page instructions that ship with the unit 4) During five different calls, and two internet 'chat' session, I was told that I was being transferred to 'level II' support but either I was put on hold and the line ultimately went dead, or in 3 instances I was told that Level II support would call back but they never did (after waiting over a week) 5) By some fluke I was finally able to talk to a person in Level II support and she ran through my situation and concluded quickly that my unit was defective and arranged an RMA to ship me a replacement 6) The replacement arrived with the wrong cables, had a funny rattle inside, but also did not work. Luckily I was able to return my unit to Amazon for a refund (they extended the period for returns for the christmas season). So my lesson from this is 1) Never buy anything from Linksys, 2) Always buy stuff from Amazon. P.S. As if this experience wasn't enough, I decided not to give up and ordered the Netgear music system. I was able to set that box up in about 15 minutes and it works like a charm. My daughter is finally happy!
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