By Lou Dolinar
Fourth in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

Say "file sharing," and most folks these days assume you're discussing music piracy via Kazaa or BitTorrent. In fact, there are other kinds of file sharing that are legal and useful, though generally neglected.

I'm referring, of course, to home file servers for music, a subject we started in a previous column. These are the descendants of giant mainframes that once ran our airline reservation systems, processed tax returns, automated banking.

A music file server works on the same principles as these old monsters: You keep one copy of your data on one computer, where it can be managed, backed up, added to with ease. In the case of music, that could be a few hundred albums, plus various playlists to organize them.

Thanks to random access hard drive technology, a half-dozen other PCs or PC-like devices can connect to that computer via a wired or wireless network, and can play back entirely different songs at the same time, anywhere in the house.

With a couple of nasty exceptions, music codecs (MP3, for example) are compatible with pretty much any computer or computer- like device. Contemporary operating systems, meanwhile, have file sharing built in. Music playback software like iTunes, WinAmp and MusicMatch, are can look at external drives across a network and incorporating the songs found there into the local library, without actually copying the files.

This means that any computer in your home can act as a file server and play back music lodged on any other computer, with any software, provided they're on the same network. Here's how it works: The other night my daughter Ann was complaining about her cheapie speakers and pestering me to build her a nice pair like the GR Research's AV3s in my office. Father knows best, says I, it's the poor bitrate on your MP3s, not the speakers, that makes your system sound so bad. Yours truly, of course, makes only bit-perfect rips in uncompressed WAV format.

To demonstrate, I logged on to her Xandros Linux box (10 months, no spyware, no crashes, no viruses), which I'd already set up for file sharing. I assigned her LimeWire directory as drive Z on my XP system, then loaded the songs into iTunes. Soon we were interrupting our argument for a half-hour family disco session. True, Gloria Gaynor really does sound awful in MP3, but if you play it loud enough, no one will notice.

You don't need a PC to access files remotely in this fashion - there are a fair number of devices that do nothing but play back music from remote servers. These digital media receivers have been around for a couple of years, but a combination of unreliability, cranky interfaces, high prices, and lack of home networking has kept them from becoming mainstream products. Meanwhile, the number of wired and wirelessly networked homes has grown dramatically.

After reading some rave reviews on Audio Asylum, for example, I picked up Slim Devices Squeezebox (http://www.slimdevices.com/), a the pioneer of the genre. The Squeezebox, about the size of a paperback book, uses open source software and has a huge following among amateur programmers who write add-on software for it. There are versions for wired ($249) and wireless ($299) networking, and the server software can run on PCs, Macs and Linux. The remote incorporates a volume control, so you can plug it directly into a regular two-channel amp like my cheapie Audiosource Amp 2, or you can use the digital connector to a surround system or stand-alone digital/analog converter.

The user interface is excellent. I generally hate remote controls for PCs, but the Squeezebox's user interface is designed to work with the remote. You can easily read the recently upgraded 280-by- 16- pixel scrolling display from across the room. (Or in my case from my bed.) It is simple to page through your music collection by artist, genre or album, or select play lists you set up on the PC. The Squeezebox also plays Internet radio stations, and a timer allows it to function as a clock-radio. About the only problem I had was that it couldn't hold a connection to my wireless network; I had to hard wire an Ethernet jack for it.

If you have rudimentary networking skills, you could use a handful of these units to set up a sophisticated homewide audio system; software allows multiple units to be synchronized so the same tunes play on all of them. Even the most computer-phobic can probably learn to use the Squeezebox. See slimdevices.com for more information, as well as free software.

One of our readers, Bob DeRosa, just picked up a related unit, the Roku SoundBridge M500 ($199.99, www.rokulabs.com), which looks a lot sexier than the Squeezebox.

DeRosa has tried other systems, but his reaction was similar to mine - this is the first one that's elegant enough for normal people to use.

He picked up on a function I had missed: Both the Squeezebox and the SoundBridge server software will stream audio from your home system to anywhere in the world there's an Internet connection - great for listening to your music collection at work.

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY, Share and share alike with music files

[NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition

Newsday - Long Island, N.Y.

Author: LOU DOLINAR

Date: Mar 21, 2005

Start Page: A.26

Edition: Combined editions

Section: BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY

Text Word Count: 854