pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



wolf-apparatus
@wolf-apparatus

this Turtle Beach AudioTron is an early (2001) network music player, similar to the one @cathoderaydude was talking about in a recent video. this model also came up on discord, where things like “$20 on ebay” and “works with a normal ass SMB server” (where my music already is) were mentioned so i figured i gotta try it

and, well, it does work. but setting it up was (and continues to be) a hell of a sysadmin job. details below


the good

tunes baby

it sure as hell the frick does play music. sounds damn good. SPDIF output on the back works too so i can even hook that up if i decide it doesn't sound damn good enough and want to use my external DAC that sounds really damn good, but also usually runs internal (USB) clock, so it gets sync issues with an external SPDIF input unless i go in and reconfigure it to external sync, which causes other problems

dials and lights

the interface is also pretty nice. i've updated it to latest firmware, which i suspect significantly post-dates the iPod and has therefore learned from it. it has proper artist / album / track drill-downs (if you turn on "advanced mode") and even gives you a web interface where you can control the player, select music, and configure some additional settings not editable on the front panel.

i think those "GROUP / ADD / CLEAR" buttons are some way to manage a play queue but i'm not totally sure. might need to RTFM.

also, the clock looks damn nice. syncs to NTP as well. plus we all love a light-up transport button.

the bad

suspiciously missing Jony Ive Seal of Approval

despite presumably learned from the iPod's hierarchical menus, it's not learned from its general UI polish. some things i've noticed already:

  • it does play tracks in album order (something i'm not sure the release firmware did? manual is unclear), but if you drill down to the track list from the album view it alphabetizes them by ID3 name instead.
  • the clock screen does not lock out the normal menu interface. it normally gives you a Track - Artist - Album - Genre - List menu, selectable with the big knob on the right. if you, say, notice that it's On Screensaver and decide to hit the largest control on the device to dismiss it, you will select a drill-down view. usually the Track view, which is never what anyone in the history of music has ever wanted. if you scroll, you'll end up with the cursor something else. you have to hit Stop to dismiss the clock without doing anything.
  • during playback you can spin the knob to change the volume. for some reason this adjustment is very touchy but also buffers very slowly, so if you turn it a half turn or so it'll decrease the volume by 40 dB over the next three seconds and turning it the other way doesn't immediately stop it.

crackerjack CPU (duh)

the web server gets extremely slow if you're playing music. maybe not a huge issue if it didn't, y'know, contain controls like "Stop" and "Volume down". the web server is also extremely janky ASP shit, although i don't know if it would work better with a period-correct browser

visualizen't

the screen you see in the picture is what it looks like while playing. you can also configure it to show the time.

the ugly

culture shock

it doesn't support SMBv2. for samba one must server min protocol = NT1. this should not be done

i had to set up a separate instance of samba, running in its own k8s pod, that exposes the music library as a read-only, passwordless, NT1 share. should you have experience with samba administration, you'll probably know that running two copies of smbd on the same machine is a giant pain, and despite being on k8s these are, network-wise, on the same machine because it's not like you can set up a vhost config for SMB. i had to stick a second NIC in the machine (ok, patch in the second NIC that was already there), configure each smbd to only listen on one interface, and then figure out how to get my stupid router to issue different DNS entries for each (including twenty minutes of incredibly silly DNS troubleshooting i'm not interested in talking about.)

this does work now but i think i'm gonna need to have a second security-related crack at it. need to see if i can restrict the pod's interface access, lock down the SMB config a little more, and maybe even try and set up a vlan that only includes that interface and the audiotron, but there are two switches between the k8s stack and the audiotron, neither of which are set up for vlan routing right now, so that's gonna be a total pain.

old and tired wiggly electrons

it also doesn't support 100BASE-T. 10 megabit only. surprisingly this is actually not an issue for my modern 10 Gb switch but other people have reported issues with similar devices. it also does HPNA although possibly not with this firmware

it's a MP3 player. that means it plays MP3s.

and, possibly even worse for me but maybe not surprisingly, it only supports two formats: MP3, and WAV. ~all my music is FLAC.

even worse, whatever ffmpeg does with ID3 tags while converting from FLAC makes it go bananas. i suspect i could do configuration about this but for now i've been testing it with a copy of the whole FLAC library converted to WAV, which has simpler tagging and doesn't confuse it, except for when the tags contain UTF-8 that gets mojibaked but i mean you couldn't expect anything different

i don't want to maintain two copies of my music in any format, and for various reasons FLAC is the only thing i want actually taking up space on my hard drive. so, i'm working on writing a whole ass FUSE driver to automatically convert files. this actually has precedent, someone wrote a plugin for Samba 2.2.x to do the same thing for the same reason.

unsurprisingly, i have not found great success. i've got it working, i've got it so i can pull up the fake MP3s on my laptop and play 'em right off, but the audiotron doesn't like it for some reason. i'll probably have a second crack at it tomorrow now that i have it on its own smbd and can really crank up the debug logging but for now im tired


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in reply to @wolf-apparatus's post:

The story you've told of your vintage digital audio playback deck and networkable broadcast device is wonderfully fascinating; I had no idea Turtle Beach's design and manufacturing breadth went into full digital audio playback decks of what would've been far more novel design twenty years ago, and that their chosen remit was not limited to audio accessories like headphones, microphones and headsets, and a range of gaming console and PC input devices and controllers.

I am presuming by your description of the Turtle Beach AudioTron playback deck as a functional relative of the iPods of its era, that it uses solid state or inert memory for music data storage rather than a mechanical hard drive of standard computer bay or smaller format, the latter of which would not have been used in most if any iPods or other beefier-memory portable MP3 or FLAC players until many years later.

May I ask what you understand the AudioTron's memory storage capacity to be, and ask it of you then, with the assumption that it does so with its own local hardware rather than external add-on storage?

-2Paw.