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| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: Linksys Wireless-B Music System WMLS11B | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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User Submitted Linksys Wireless-B Music System WMLS11B Reviews (cont...)Date: 2005-01-03 Nice concept but not quite ready... yet. Just bought this unit tonight (Wal*Mart) and was quite excited by the idea I could listen to my MP3 collection and Internet Radio anywhere I could plug this in! Nice looking unit, too! Got it home and ended up configuring it manually because it wouldn't use DHCP to grab IP settings, wired or wireless. It worked OK on a wired connection. The User Interface is difficult to navigate (at best). Finding a song by browsing is very difficult; if you try to go back one menu level, it takes you all the way back to the root level. On wireless, it refused to play even one song all the way through without skipping. I thought maybe the signal wasn't great but I was only about ten (10!) feet from my wireless router. I put my laptop (with 802.11b) next to the Linksys and played the same song through both. My cheapo laptop wireless card did better than this $110 unit! I am not only not impressed, I'm disappointed and discouraged. This is the first birthday present I've had to take back for good. Sorry, Linksys, but I have to give you some advice: Make the unit a little better and you'll have me as a customer. I've been in I.T. for eight years now and I'm quite well aware of how easy it would be to fix these issues. Len Date: 2005-01-03 Agree - Great Idea, But Not Ready for Prime Time After five hours, the music center is now working, but my wireless computer is no longer working. I have setup networks before but still had to call Linksys support. There seemed to be no real solution. We restarted the router and music center dozens of times. The last thing tech support had me do was change the wireless channel to 9 and then the music center began to work, but the notebook quit working. Then, I was transferred to another technician and was cut off. I called back and was told to download a utility, which I did and it didn't work with my version of the router (keep in mind it is a Linksys router and Linksys told me to download that utility). So, I called back again and this time, the story is the problem is now with my Cisco wireless card and I need to call Cisco even though everything worked before trying to set up Linksys' Music Center. I set the channel back to 11 and the music center still works, but have not figured out why my notebook no longer authenicates. Even for the computer literate, my advise would be unless you have a couple of days to waste, wait for the next version and hope they figure out the bugs. Date: 2005-01-03 Linksys Music System: bait and switch This device lured me with two separate attractions: 1) internet streaming radio stations without a PC, and 2) Rhapsody music service. I admit that on point #1 the WMLS11B was satisfactory as it linked in easily to my network and allowed me to "browse" hundreds of internet streaming MP3 radio stations from all over the world (like shortwave radios as a kid, only better!). Unfortunately some stations would mysteriously reboot the device upon connection. Linksys support was not good: they suggested stopping the previous station before starting a new one. Their knowledege base lacked a link to their own firmware upgrade to cure this problem. To top it off, the upgrade failed midway thus leaving the device basically disabled and unbootable. On point 2, I didn't discover until further research on the web off the Linksys page that the Rhapsody service required a PC to be powered on and connected to the same network. Too bad. Almost bait and switch. Again Linksys support had NO IDEA how Rhapsody worked with the device, whether the connection was direct or through a PC client. I returned the device to Best Buy. Maybe someone else will have better luck! Date: 2005-01-02 things they don't tell you on the box Beware, you might need the help of a techie to set this up if you have a simple home network. For trouble-free operation and to get the full benefits of the product it assumes that you have 1) a wireless access point (for infrastructure mode) and 2) a router or other residential gateway that serves DHCP. The person I set this up for had neither. So we had to put a PCI wireless card in his only desktop, which was tapping his DSL modem directly, and enable XP Internet Connection Sharing and ad-hoc wireless with static addresses. This requires a certain level of wi-fi, tcp/ip and firewall knowledge that the average consumer doesn't have and a thorough workout of practically all of the unit's configuration options -- a tedious process itself. This is all complicated by the fact that the supplied documentation is zero help for this kind of configuration (and questionable for the "normal" one) and, as is often the case with Linksys fringe products, there are zero online support resources as in NO knowledge base entries for the product, nothing. This is extremely poor customer service. Especially considering the high volume of customer service calls this product must generate. Also frustratingly missing was any description of what network ports the unit uses so that a firewall can be configured properly (again, using internet connection sharing). In the end we got both the Internet Radio and Music Server options working but not without much hair pulling. This should really be considered a "kit" instead of a product. In our situation it worked but just barely and only because I have experience configuring awnry wireless LAN products. As for quality, the unit is plasticky but that should come as no surprise to Linksys regulars. The speakers are a disappointment and don't perform like they look like they might. But any serious user is going to connect this to their existing audio system anyway so no big deal. All in all I think it is a risky purchase for the general public. I'm giving it 2 stars because I believe only 40% of buyers at most will not regret the purchase. Date: 2005-01-01 Works great, once you get it set up We recently purchased the Linksys Music System so we could have essentially a portable boombox-type device we could move from room to room and access music and Internet radio using our wireless network. Setting up the system was a bit of a pain. We followed the instructions and it worked fine in wired mode but wouldn't work when we went wireless. I configured and re-configured several times but no luck. Finally, after much frustration, I called Linksys Tech Support and one of the technicians got it going in about 5 minutes (we switched from using DHCP to a static IP address and that was it). Now that it's configured, it works great. We can stream music from our MusicMatch library or from any of a large number of radio stations without a problem. The only negatives are that the speakers are somewhat underpowered (we use them near max volumn most of the time) and the unit can sometimes be a bit slow to respond to the remote. Neither of these issues comes close to offsetting the convenience and functionality of this unit. Do be sure to get the latest firware updates though as many people have reported problems with the one shipped with the unit.
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