NETGEAR Wireless Digital Music Player

by Netgear

Product Details

Product Manual [3.33mb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 10.7 x 1.7 inches ; 1.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 5.5 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00011Y1MQ
• Item model number: MP101NA
• Batteries: 2 AA batteries required. (included)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (87 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 1, 2004

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Liberate Your Digital Music and Listen Anywhere at Home
Finally, you can enjoy your digital music files together with your friends and family, in any room of your home. NETGEAR's Wireless Digital Music Player connects your existing home stereo to your home computer network so you can listen to your MP3 and Windows Media® format digital music files ­ with the great sound quality of your stereo speakers ­ wherever you like to relax and entertain. The Wireless Digital Music Player is compatible with your 802.11b or 802.11g wireless network, and it’s very simple to set up and use.

View a diagram of how NETGEAR's Digital Music Player works with your existing wireless network.

Easy-to-install software automatically finds all your music files by title, artist, album, genre or playlist on any networked PC. It then collects them into one complete database so you don’t have to do the work. Sit back and put your feet up ­ remote control and a crystal clear, four-line display let you select music without even getting out of your chair. If you like, you can expand your music collection to over 400,000 songs by subscribing to RHAPSODY Digital Music Service (free 30-day trial included). Everywhere You Are Listen to your MP3s and Windows Media format digital music files in the comfort of your living room, away from your PC. With multiple NETGEAR Digital Music Players, you can enjoy music throughout your home, for "whole-home digital audio."

Easy as 1, 2, 3 Connect the cable to your stereo, install the software on one networked PC, and you’re ready to listen! The NETGEAR Wireless Digital Music Player’s media server software automatically finds all the MP3 and Windows Media format digital music files stored on any networked PC in your home, and the NETGEAR media server software recognizes your existing organization by title, artist, album, genre, and playlist to suit any mood. From the comfort of your couch you can use the remote to listen to your music and the RHAPSODY digital jukebox. Crystal Clear Hear your music at its best! Enjoy 100% digital, high-quality sound through your existing stereo, boom box, headphones, or powered speakers. Fully Equipped Protected with hardware-based Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) 64-bit & 128-bit encryption security. Remote functionality means you can easily browse and program your music from across the room without leaving the comfort of your couch. Gives you remote access to your NETGEAR Wireless Digital Music Player with PC or PDA web interface.

The Wireless Digital Music Player connects your existing home stereo to your home computer network via standard RCA connections.

Product Description

NETGEAR's Wireless Digital Music Player lets you enjoy your digital music files stored on your computers and unlimited, worldwide Internet radio with your friends and family throughout your home. It connects your existing home stereo to your home computer network so you can listen to the digital music collection from any PC on your home stereo system. You can also listen to music directly from a 30,000 track digital jukebox using the RHPSODY¿ service (only available in U.S.) or hear thousands of Internet radio stations even when your PCs are turned off. Easy-to-install software on one PC automatically finds all your music files on any networked PC and collects them into one complete database. The remote control and stylish user interface let you sit on the couch and wirelessly stream MP3s or Windows Media format files from any PC on your home network straight to your stereo! The MP101 supports many PC operating systems, not just Windows XP, and the LCD display means you don't need to turn on your TV when you want to listen to music.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Works well in wired setup - download latest software!, December 27, 2004

By 

Steve Frazier (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: NETGEAR Wireless Digital Music Player (Personal Computers)

Now that I have this set up it does exactly what I wanted it to very well -- that is, in a wired network environment, it streams all the mp3 files that I have on my PC's hard drive through my traditional two-channel audio setup. It has a number of limitations: it doesn't support Internet radio, except for a paid service, and it doesn't support various rights-protected data formats. But it does do the one thing I bought it for extremely well: allowing me to enjoy my entire music collection in an organized, well catalogued way, through my home audio system.

As this whole field of products is still pretty new, I also didn't want to spend more money on one of the more advanced systems -- it seems that the customer feedback on all of these media players remains pretty mixed. So I stuck with something relatively simple, and this little box does what I want for a reasonable price. (Previously I was using my iPod on a docking station, connected to my stereo...for the modest price of this Netgear player I've now liberated the iPod that previously was wired up to my stereo.)

A couple of cautions:

1. A lot of the customer problems cited here at Amazon seem to relate to problems with wireless transmission. I did not even try to set this up in a wireless network; I just hard-wired it into the network port I had installed in my living room. I have had a lot of frustration in my home w/wireless devices so finally just gave up and dropped in wiring for a home network while I was having other electrical work done in my house. I am glad I bit the bullet -- the wired network is saving me a lot of time and trouble. This Netgear product is just one example of the kinds of things that are very happy tethered to a wire that seem to be much more problematic when they are wireless.

2. Throw away the software disk that comes with the hardware -- don't install it!. Instead, download the new software and firmware that is on Netgear's site. I couldn't get this to work at all at first -- tech support advised me to uninstall the provided software, download the software update on their site, and start over. This got more complicated than it sounds because I'd already built a database of songs for the Netgear and I had to hunt down this database file and kill it, too...it got a little bit tricky...so it took me a couple of hours in all to get this fixed. Had I started with the new software posted on Netgear's site, I would have had the whole thing done in 20 minutes. In any case, just go right to netgear's site and download their new software, and don't use the junk they ship with the product.

I also found netgear's tech support to be very, very good -- they answered the phone quickly (on Christmas Eve!) and were extremely helpful and patient.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Returned this for a Squeezebox, May 13, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: NETGEAR Wireless Digital Music Player (Personal Computers)

I'm a bit of an audiophile and I was disappointed in the MP101, it lacks digital outputs and doesn't support any lossless compression formats (I've got tracks in FLAC, WAV, AIFF and now Apple's new Lossless format). The software is a joke and the product was really hard to set up. Plus, the LCD display was hard to read at a distance.

While the MP101 is a bit cheaper, it's a poor imitation of the product that I ended up with, which was Squeezebox. It's got both optical and coax digital outputs, supports tons of audio formats including uncompressed, automatically imports from iTunes (so my playlists on my iPod are the same on my stereo).

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great concept, less-than-stellar execution, May 22, 2004

By 

C. Haswell (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: NETGEAR Wireless Digital Music Player (Personal Computers)

I purchased this product to use with Rhapsody, as it is recommended by the service. It's very simple to set up for a wireless network - I simply entered my WEP settings and rebooted the device. Unfortunately, it loses wireless connectivity way too often to be practical. One "feature" of the player is that it reboots whenever it loses its wireless connection. As each reboot takes a couple of minutes, I got very frustrated getting dropped from the network multiple times in a row while simply browsing my playlists. I don't know if there was some sort of conflict between the player and my Access Point (a Linksys WAP11), but this sort of wireless performance is simply unacceptable. None of my other wireless devices have any connectivity issues. I didn't try the wired network connection, so I don't know how it performs. Hopefully, it doesn't have the same connectivity issues as the wireless mode.

The included software is functional, but limited. It functions as a server applet to which the MP101 connects. It allows you to catalog all of the MP3 or WMA files on your local drive, but it does not have a way to catalog files on network drives from what I could tell. For a networking product, I found this odd. I was also disappointed that you could not control the unit via software. I have a multi-room audio setup and was hoping to be able to play my Rhapsody playlists through it using this product. Unfortunately, you can only control the unit through the supplied remote control.

With firmware improvements, this could be a much better product. Hopefully, NETGEAR will address the problems in the near future. As for me, I'm going to purchase a Slim Devices Squeezebox like the reviewer below did - it has much more robust software, digital outputs and support for Rhapsody (via plugin) as well.