Question 101 Firefly, Pinnacle SoundBridge & Roku

[Gday21]

Hi,

It looks like Santa may bring me a Pinnacle SoundBridge, and this is a bit of a 101 question what is the difference between the Pinnacle & the Roku Soundbridge and how does it work with Firefly via the NSLU2.
Any experienced users of the Pinnacle & Firefly out there I would appreciate any feedback.

Rgds

Gday

[stretch]

Roku branded units are licenced to use the daap protocol.
Pinnacle branded units are not as Apple refused to Let the music play.

Firefly was originally only a daap server but when Roku / Pinnacle ran into the licencing problem they created the “Roku Server Protocol”

Firefly can also use the Roku server protocol.

It would also appear that Pinnacle have more models in the SoundBridge line up than Roku.

The NSLU2 is just a NAS box (that uses USB hard drives). It’s one of the more “hackable” boxes on the market. Think of it as a little computer / server with no keyboard, no mouse, no screen….

[ecosprog]

I´m running a Roku M1001 and Pinnacle Soundbridge radio, both from an NSLU2 running unslung 6.8 (thrid party firmware), and using the latest Firefly nightly to serve the music. As the previous poster said, the Pinnacle products don´t support DAAP but as long as you go with Firefly this won´t be an issue.

The performance of the units is great and despite having a music library of 10,000+ tracks the NSLU2 manages to survive scanning all of these and serving up the information. This can be a bit slow when you first turn the system on but that is due to the large catalogue of music and with a smaller library would be much faster. I almost never have problems with playback and the few times issues have arisen it has always been a networking problem and never a Soundbridge/NSLU2 issue.

In all I have found the Soundbridge/NSLU2/Firefly to be a fairly bullet-proof setup. SUre the NSLU2 would be a lot happier with a bit more processor power and memory but as long as you aren´t looking to catalogue and play 10´s of thousands of tracks it does a great job.

The only recommendation I would make if you are new to Firefly and the NSLU2 is to start with the latest stable release. The latest nightly, although more feature rich, has a few problems with the dtatbase and scanning during playback. Get your system up and running and enjoy the music before your break it with a nightly release and start pulling your hair out.

[Rage]

Once you have it up and running it works great, there is quite a lot to do in order to unsling yout NSU-2 but once it’s done it works great with the Pinnacle SB and firefly.

[Gday21]

Thanks for all the feedback it was very useful. I forgot to mention I had been using the NSLU2 for a couple of months with a Maxtor drive as a Music Server, but had no experience with the SoundBridge, which was a big ticket item to have if it didn’t work. I was also worried about MT-DAAPD versions.
So I’m pleased to say it worked straight out the box like a Mac, well almost, it didn’t like PSK Wifi security codes, but other than that it just played and played. So for me it was a 10/10 for the SoundBridge & Firefly. So I will be recommending it as a combination to friends who want to do the same.
My next posting will most probably be about Internet Radio & Firefly, but for now I am going to go and enjoy some old Pink Floyd tracks, cos really it’s about the music.
Have a good new year.

Rgds

Gday 😀 😀

[Author]

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