My much-awaited Roku Soundbridge arrived this morning. Have only played with it a little, but it's pretty nice. I've got the M1000 model, which has the smaller screen.

It's completely plug-and-play and connected to my iTunes shared music instantly. Works well, but it buffers each track before it plays it and it doesn't seem to buffer upcoming tracks, so skipping tracks results in a pause while it fills the buffer. I think/hope this is something that will probably get addressed in a future update.

The interface is simple and efficient. Browsing for music is easy - you can search by artist, album, song, etc and jump through the alphabet with the left/right keys, then skip through the list with the up/down keys. It also picks up playlists from iTunes and provides the option to skip songs in iTunes that are unchecked.

The visualisations are a little disappointing, but that's coming from someone who is used to Toby's excellent work, so maybe my expectations are a little higher than the average consumer.

Build quality is very good - the aluminium is finished very well, the plastic endcaps are ok. The remote control is solid and well designed.

The VFD display is clear and bright; unfortunately the edges of the panel are clearly visible through the front panel - maybe tinting the front panel would have helped hide this, but it's a very minor cosmetic issue.

Overall, I'm very impressed. Having seen the effort that was required to get the first empeg players out the door, I can appreciate the hard work that Roku has put into this and understand the delays. I'd highly recommend it to anyone looking to replace their ageing Rio Receiver.

Can you que up tracks/albums/playlists or just play premade playlists ?

You can add songs/albums/etc to the 'song queue'. I think you're limited to always adding them to the end of the queue though.

When playing normally, it does pre-buffer the next track and it doesn't appear to add any gap other than what is in the MP3 files to start with.

Hi David,

I've been looking into getting one of these for a while, now they are out is there any chance of you posting a couple of real life photos, I can't seem to find any out there yet

Cheers

Cris.

Front view

Top view with remote

Very short movie

Roku Labs Website specs and line cards there.

"a proportional font with proper descenders on "p" and "y"?

That's something I found fairly disappointing - the typeface is very poor and the large size face is appallingly bad. The text scrolls a character at a time too, even though the bootup sequence has text that scrolls properly - maybe that is an animation though.

Still, the product has only just got out the door and I'm sure they'll continue to develop the software.

It works with the older slimserver protocol. There is no support from either Roku or Slimdevices however.

Got mine yesterday All I can say is WOW WHAT A MACHINE!!!!!'

I've got a Slim Devices Squeezebox. I'm similarly happy with it. Even better, when I had that lightning strike at my house, the Squeezebox died. They quoted me $90 to repair it, so I shipped it back. It came back fixed, no charge. Nice.

I picked a Roku up about a month ago... I'm fairly happy with it, except it doesn't work well with the slimserver software. I get constant rebuffering and cutouts, and I've tried multiple versions of the slimserver software to no avail.

Works great with iTunes, but until I can get the cutouts fixed with slimserver I'm going to have to hold back on recommending it to my more clueful friends.

-- Gary F.

Hmm, thanks for the pointer for mt-daapd, I hadn't stumbled across this yet. I'll definitely be playing around with it on my jukebox. It looks like it doesn't support Ogg out of the box (which I need since >50% of my collection is in ogg) but it also looks like it does support on the fly transcoding. Of course, slimserver will also supposedly do this but I haven't had much luck with it.

-- Gary F.

Have you tried Windows Media Connect...it has been working well for me these past few days. I haven't experienced any rebuffering or dropouts so far...

The big problem with that is I don't own a single windows machine. I have an Ultra-1 running solaris, a laptop running linux, a desktop running linux, a jukebox server running linux, a linux-powered NAS, 2 empegs that run linux and a mac mini running Mac OS-X

I've got an old spare toshiba pentium piece of junk sitting in the closet waiting for me to build a jukebox for my garage that I could theoretically install windows on but then I'd have to *ahem* acquire a windows license somewhere which just probably isn't going to happen.

Guess you could call me an OS bigot... but then, I don't just whine about how little I like Microsoft, I actually put my money where my mouth is

-- Gary F.