Rhapsody in the Living Room

Some good friends recently gifted me the Roku Soundbridge M500. It is a beautiful device designed for a simple purpose...connect to your home network and play any songs you have on your iTunes or Rhapsody on your home stereo.

One one side of the tube is a wireless card (comes with!) and on the other is the wired RCA connectors to the stereo and a plug to the walls (also included!).

That's it!

After a semi-quick set-up, it was recognizing and connecting to my home network library and playing songs from my iTunes on the big speakers. Brilliant!

Even more Brilliant is the Rhaposdy connection - after enabling the UPnP port, simply add any song to your Rhapsody library and it will be available to play on your stereo. No more fumbling with wires, moving the computer closer to the stereo or listening to music at home through the computer. Just add it to your "library", which is just a pointer to a file on their server, and play it anywhere. It also plays any of your Rhapsody playlists or custom radio stations!

It's amazing to watch the evolution of technology and how we are building new devices to complement the older new devices. Who would have thought that I've have room for over 100,000 albums in my living room, now I can think of a song and have it playing in high (enough) quality.

Loving it...

p.s. One more amazing feature I just discovered after posting this - Favorite Internet Radio stations! Apparently the Roku Soundbridge can actually connect to .pls files (aka http://www.biscoradio.com/bisco.pls, http://www.tealeafgreen.com:8000/listen.pls) or .m3u files (http://web1.nugs.net/vault/nugs.net_radio.m3u) and stream them like regular radio. Nice!