N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

The misses asked for a portable music setup that could be transported around the house. I started out looking at Ipod solutions (no flaming please), but soon abandoned it as it (surprise, surprise) doesn't support upnp.
I have a NAS box with twonky and tried to hook up my N770 with the newest nokia media streamer - and it worked like a charm.

Now for the question:
Does anyone have any advice about portable speakers (battery powered) that:
1: sound good
2: makes the package (speakers + Nxxx) portable.
3: has bluetooth (as I'm thinking of buying a N800 off eBay).

TIA
Nick

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

Not sure why BT would be an advantage here; you get lower sound quality (HSP) or high CPU usage and general software difficulty (A2DP), more total power consumption, and the ability to pick up one end of the combo and forget the other, breaking the connection and causing general fun.

I don't know any specific models, unfortunately...

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

well, bluetooth was just to have the option + make it possible for others to easily play music from there gadgets...

Right now the "JBL on tour XT" is on top of my list (as the XTB with bluetooth is MIA). It has an USB port that can charge other units - but I've mailed them and asked whether USB power is enabled in battery mode.

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

Maybe the best option for you would be to upgrade to the N800. It has excellent built-in speakers, so you wouldn't need any portable bluetooth speakers.

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

The N800's speakers are good, for this sorta thing; they have as much bass as some laptop speakers.

OTOH, that still means they have ~zero bass. I regularly listen to mine over the speakers, but BT or wired speakers do have the potential to get both higher volumes and better LF response. I just don't care enough...

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

I've been playing with a few different setups.. was trying to find some sort of bluetooth setup to go from the living room to downstairs.. my advice would be to just abandon any hope of bluetooth.. it basically comes down to a finicky setup for more money than it's worth. I found 20 dollar logitech computer speakers and a drill solved my problem much better than I could ever hope.

I was streaming to my n800, as they have surprisingly decent speakers for the size. Arguably better than my dell and toshiba laptop speakers But I wanted better sound and portability...

make a long story short(er), I have two computers in my house, both running ubuntu, set up a pulseaudio multisync so that whatever I play on the computer upstairs plays downstairs, htpc runs spdif out on the stereo upstairs, computer speakers downstairs, and I had a usb fm transmitter I cracked apart and added a much longer antenna to it. So I now get sound everywhere in the house except the bedroom and garage, which the fm transmitter has covered. That tied with vnc viewer on the n800 to control the media player.. makes for a pretty killer setup.

Only catch is I wish I could figure out how to scale 1920x1080 down to whatever the tablets run on vnc..

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

thanks for the info guys - it actually turned out to be another setup the misses wanted.

So to hijack my own thread - chayzer - your setup is actually what I want.

Can you give me some more info about your pulseaudio multisync setup? I have a HTPC as my primary source (which runs XP + meedio), this is of course not gonna work with pulseaudio - but a dual setup could work...

---
what I wouldn't do to get a wifi speaker setup....

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

Could you please make this "pulseaudio multisync" story longer and longer please, and your total setup too? If you already do the job, I would like to copy it rather than re-invent the wheel. TIA,

bun

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

My wife says she want's a whole house stereo but when I went to get something she said that wasn't what she wanted at all, so I returned a nice stero system. Even with box unopened I had to negotiate to not pay a restock fee. I'm curious what your wife decided on, as I have no Idea what my wife has in mind.

And I'll second ther request for Chayzer's details. That's something I'd like and could possibly satisfy the wife. Maybe a screenshot, For my wife the Graphic User Interface can't be more complicated than TiVo.

To the original issue, I was thinking the PSP should have good speakers, and should be able to be hacked to stream audio. Alternatively, there might be external PSP speakers with even better quality. Assuming they would fit the N800 without too much mess.

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

I'm actually thinking in "low tech" solutions atm.

As my HTPC is the central system, I'm thinking about getting an FM transmitter, and then use whatever radio setup I want - that being a normal stereo, n800+speakers, etc.

A decent "home" FM transmitter costs about 100 $ on ebay - so I just have to connect it to the HTPC - and everything should be honky dory...

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

Chayzer, just to jump in here I'll add my two cents for a request for more detailed information about the pulseaudio multisync setup, as I've been looking for a long time for software that will actually do synchronized audio playback accross multiple machines (the typical answer is "You can't, too many variables with buffer times/hardware/etc, just get a multi-zone amp..." so I'm very interested).
If you're running the VNC server on Ubuntu it's relatively easy: every VNC instance can run at it's own resolution/color depth/etc, you just have to set it up on your VNC configuration (you can actually have say 3 servers, all running at different resolutions, with a few simple settings). I'm not sure exactly where the setup is for Ubuntu, but on my Fedora box it's /etc/sysconfig/vncservers, and all I have in there is this:
VNCSERVERS="1:rob"
VNCSERVERARGS[1]="-geometry 1024x768 -depth 16"

The standard X desktop is a lot higher than 1024x768, but I found that was a good res to run VNC at so that it didn't consume too much space on my regular machine when VNC'ing in. There are lots of good resources about VNC config available online, just google for 'em.

Thanks!
-Rob

Re: N770/800 as a streaming "boombox"
 

Sorry it took so long to get back to you guys. Kind of forgot I posted here. Anyhoo,

I had decided to change all my computers over to the newer ubuntu when it came out, as I have tried many different distros and that happened to be the one the girlfriend is comfortable with. So 8.04 comes with the pulseaudio server automatically installed. I believe Fedora does too...

So starting with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

I had to install padevchooser (sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install padevchooser) and fire it up with Applications -> Sound and
Video -> PulseAudio Device Chooser

You will then have a little icon with a mic jack in your system tray, click on that and you'll get a drop down menu, Go into "Configure Local Sound Server"

Under the multicast tab, you can set up whether it is just a receiver, or a sender, I found I had problems with more then one sender on the network as it would receive it and resend it, cause some sort of gnarly feedback. I set my sender to "Create seperate audio device for Multicast".

Once you get rhythmbox playing, you can go to your Device Chooser drop down and go to Volume Control -> Playback tab -> Right click on Rhythmbox stream and set to output to RTP Multicast

On all your receiver computers, you can now go to your device chooser dropdown -> Volume Control -> Show Dropdown (bottom right) -> All Streams and you should be able to see the RTP Multicast stream from whichever computer is sending it, you can than right click and send it to whatever output necessary to get to your speakers. You should now be able to play pulseaudio supported applications on your sender and hear them on your receivers.

Things I've learned:

- To get flash working in firefox, sudo apt-get install libflashsupport
- If you want to set something to default, seems to work the best in Volume Control -> Output Devices Tab -> Right click on whichever device you want to be default.
- Wired ethernet kicks the **** out of wireless
- If stuff doesn't make sense and you're getting weird errors, open a terminal and type, pulseaudio -k && pulseaudio -D, this kills the pulseaudio dameon and restarts is, then go to device chooser and quit, and then start it again.
- Having a home that plays sound everywhere helps with chores.
- If you're running something that doesn't like pulseaudio, for example, XboxMediaCenter, you can change the shortcut to start "pasuspender XboxMediaCenter" and it will play locally using good ol' alsa, I hear skype requires this as well.

For you windows guys, http://www.cendio.com/pulseaudio , and you're on your own from there on out.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something.. good luck to all. Sorry about the the delay in getting back. Was too busy rocking out downstairs, in the kitchen, in the garage... you get the point.

And thanks for the tip jolouis.. I'll have to check it out for sure..