Tong Family

I’ve had one of these “Audiotron’s”:http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/products/audiotron/feedback.asp forever but have never really used it much. Spent a little time hacking and realized it doesn’t work because it needs a magic user name and password to access a file share. Aargh. How is anyone supposed to remember this stuff, let alone that there is a web interface to the thing. Thank goodness, google led me back to turtlebeach.com and the firmware downloads and most important the default username (admin) and password (admin) for the Audiotron device’s website. I’ve long sinced lost the CDs and things for it.
Anyway, when I get to it, I’ll have to reload new firmware, which you install by stuffing it into the root of a share it looks for, and also get it to find my songs on the network.
Reminds me that I really need to try a NAS box since just having the PC on is such a pain. Also check out all the utilities for “Audiotron”:http://www.tasman.nl/AT/ now. Cool applications are things like ATTray that lets you run the Audiotron remotely from a Windows tray icon rather than from its mini-web server. “Javatron”:http://javatron.sourceforge.net/ is a Java program that does the same thing. Also there is something called TOC generator so Audiotron doesn’t have to index a big disk full of MP3s.
Finally got this working, the firmware upgrade is really strange. The firmware differs depending on whether you are using Ethernet or HPNA (Ethernet over phoneline). So v3.2.25 is for Ethernet and v3.2.24 is for HPNZ. Go figure. You put the files into the root of a music share directory as descrbied on the “Audiotron”:ftp://ftp.voyetra.com/pub/tbs/audiotro/at3_2_25.zip site and fix is “complicated”:http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/support/at_webserver/backflash.asp?cmd=unreg
Other sad thing is that since homes don’t have name servers, it has to search the entire name space looking for shares. That’s actually not a bad idea, but because you never know if something is on or not, it isn’t clear how to guarantee you have the song. Also, you have to be super disciplined about tagging music because it relies so much on MP3 tags.
That being said, there seems to be a pretty good community of folks writing apps for the thing (which is really a Windows CE-based microprocessor which is why it relies on Netbios and shares so much).
Finally, this is a good source of MP3 utilities and their latest incarnations:
* Lame. Now up to version 3.97 at “Softpedia”:http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/11/1/2/11-1-2-15.shtml
* AC3Filter from “Softpedia”:http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/11/1/2/11-1-2-60.shtml now in its 1.01 RC5 flavor, so its the latest.
* “GX::TRanscoder”:http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/11/1/2/11-1-2-51.shtml. This is a universal audio transcoder that gets around all the many problems with different frequencies and formats