6. In Practice, Continued

Once everything is working, the remote control lets you navigate in the shared folders and play the music of your choice. Various classifications (by artist, album or genre) are possible to make it easy to find what you want. The Noxon can also use MusicMatch playlists, which can be extremely practical.

A typical display when playing an MP3 file, showing the title, artist and album.

Accessing Internet radio is a plus, but it's limited to stations that broadcast in MP3. Some Internet radio stations have chosen another mode (WMA or Real Audio) and aren't accessible. Still the possibilities are attractive if you like to explore. The choice of stations, classified by country or by genre, is immense! The absence of any limitation as to coverage completely redefines the idea of radio broadcasting. The sound quality goes from very mediocre to very good depending on the broadcast parameters chosen (some stations are in mono with a very low bandwidth of 24 or 32 kbs). Unfortunately, many stations are optimistic about the possibilities of the network (or their server) to provide enough average throughput and cutoffs are very frequent. And sometimes you won't be allowed to log on because the server is saturated. Still, this can be a fascinating tool with many surprises in store for those who like to surf.

The quality is fairly low, but listening to a radio station from another continent is quite possible!

Far-off, totally exotic radio stations become accessible!

In Conclusion

If you want to send music throughout your environment from your PC, the Terratec Noxon is an excellent solution, reasonably simple and low in cost. It can do everything, from simple applications to much more ambitious setups. But it's too bad it doesn't ship with server software to handle configuration and distribution.