Apple TV as Music Streamer.

[pre65]

Now folks, this has GOT to be DTB's new avatar.

[pre65]

OR

[Cressy Snr]

You worked at a Tomato factory? Gettaway widja!

DTB

Yeah.
I said to Steve Jobs, who was the factory manager at the time and was secretly developing a new line of computers with his mate, that "Tomato"
was the stupidest name for a computer I'd ever heard and that if he was going to be that stupid, he might as well call them apples

Needless to say he fired me on the spot.

Then the bastard had the gall to nick my idea for the name.

Many years later I got to work for his up an coming computer firm, Apple.

He recognised me at meeting, took me to one side and said that the name I had suggested all those years ago was the best thing that had happened to him and wanted to thank me personally.

After that he fired me again!

Some people are sooooo ungrateful.

Steve

[Dave the bass]

^^^^ Right, that Farmer Jobs is off my Christmas list from now on, that'll learn him

Oi! Phil! Gettchahands off my Avatar The learner 'L' stays until I finish 'designing' 6EW7 SE, and I will, promise.

DTB

[Nick]

Hey, you got fired twice from Apple, thats one more that Jobs

[Ali Tait]

Not had any scan problems with the Touch,beyond occasionally having to start squeezeserver manually when I've disconnected the HD USB to plug it into my laptop.

[Cressy Snr]

The AppleTV arrived today.
Let's say it is very very good indeed.
There are one or two issues with it that are annoyances more than anything else but I've fed back to apple with the info.
The perils of being an early adopter I suppose.

I'll put up a review tomorrow.

Steev

[Cressy Snr]

OK a little review of the new AppleTV.

Here's a general view of the system of amp, AppleTV and HD telly.



The AppleTV is the tiny box with the white light to the right of the amp. I was actually
quite taken aback at how small it actually is in the flesh.
There are only four connections on the back panel:
Power inlet
HDMI output
Optical digital output
Ethernet input.

Set up was a breeze. Simply connect up and switch on.
The unit boots up almost instantaneously and displays the welcome screen.
After that it is just a question of following the on-screen walk-through.

To gain access to your iTunes library you turn on home sharing in iTunes on your PC or Mac by going to "Advanced > Turn on Home Sharing.
You are prompted for your iTunes account login and password. A few seconds later a dialogue box confirms home sharing is active.

Activating home sharing on the AppleTV completes the setup.
It took me around five minutes from opening the box to settling down to some sounds.


The remote is milled from a solid aluminium block and feels lovely to use.
If you can work an iPod then you can work AppleTV. The concepts are the same.


Gaining access to your iTunes music library is matter of using the up>down>left>right actions on the circular black outer button. pressing the
middle of the ring confirms an action and takes you to the next stage.



Here we are in the music section hovering over Playlists



And now actually in the list of playlists and ready to listen.

OK so what does it sound like?
The sound via the optical digital to the Beresford DAC is excellent, as good as the SB3 in every respect.
The whole thing is very easy to use with no stutter or dropouts.

The ATV has 8Gb of onboard NAND flash storage so there are no worries about streaming HD to your TV. We watched a few HD film trailers from the iTunes Store and the picture quality was excellent; no pixellating, jaggies or any other nasty digital artefacts. Sound was the usual cinema type bass heavy spectacular and gave the baffles a real good workout - fabulous!

HD goes up to 720p so no 1080, but on my pathetic 22" screen it wouldn't matter anyway.

Alas in the UK the only film rental option is the iTunes Store at present. The USA gets NetFlix as an additional option.
You get internet radio, YouTube, Podcasts and the rest, but there needs to be an pretty smartish expansion of content availability in Europe and the rest of the world if the ATV is to take off outside the USA.
Still, it's early days, so hopefully there'll be more content available in due course.

As a music streamer the ATV is quite brilliant with superb sound quality available from its optical output, so no complaints there. However there are one or two issues.

First when playing music, you get a nice graphic of the song title and a pic of the album cover, so far so good. Trouble is the damn thing flips horizontally
with a rotate effect every twenty seconds or so.
Nice eye candy for about a minute, then it gets distracting. I cannot find any way to turn off the effect.
Apparently Plasma TVs don't like still images for too long, so those of us with LCDs have to put up with the rotate effect. Come on Apple, give us some way to turn off the damn thing!

Secondly there is a bug in the playlist handling. <EDIT we now know this is not a bug see posts below>
Make a playlist in iTunes from different tracks from different albums and no problem it appears on the AppleTV in the same order you made it.

Drag an album into the playlist sidebar however and the tracks will only appear in alphabetical order on the ATV. Not a lot of use with "Dark side of the Moon" or classical pieces then!

Use the albums list to find the album and no problem, all the tracks play in the right order.

This sounds to me like some kind of tagging issue with the ATV losing the track number info when reading from the iTunes playlist list.

Plenty of people have the same problem and are submitting bug reports so hopefully it'll be sorted with the new iOS4 update in November.


So I like the ATV a lot and intend to use it as my main music streamer.
If they get the playlist bug sorted and make it easy to turn off the
stupid "now playing" animation. It'll do me nicely.
If you don't mind being part of the iTunes ecosystem then the ATV is a no-brainer. If you have a big FLAC library then it is a non starter and you're better of with a Squeezebox.

One extra thing though is that the ATV streams 24/96 and sounds stunning with High Resolution digital. The improvement over the downsampled SB3 stream from Hi-rez downloads, was not subtle.

As a true 24/96 streamer, the ATV is utterly captivating, throwing a huge soundstage with depth going way back into the distance. Trouble is, it makes some of my regular 256KHz AAC iTunes downloads sound like toy music in comparison. But with downloads, as with most things, you gets what yer pays for.

The SB3 was not quite as adept at showing these differences. Whether that's a good thing or not, we'll have to see. As long as I keep high-rez stuff out of "normal" playlists I should be content with either.

Steve

[Cressy Snr]

Here' the business end of the ATV

Apple A4 processor

[Nick]

Here' the business end of the ATV

Apple A4 processor

Lets hear it for British technology

Nice review BTW Steve, sounds like a good solution. The need for a TV would stop me, but I would guess that would be a positive for most folk.

[Ali Tait]

Yes agreed,that's why I waited for the Touch,and the fact that I can control it with my phone makes it even better. Still,looks a good neat solution Steve. Shame Apple still haven't embraced flac yet.

[Cressy Snr]

Yes agreed,that's why I waited for the Touch,and the fact that I can control it with my phone makes it even better. Still,looks a good neat solution Steve. Shame Apple still haven't embraced flac yet.

I like the idea of controlling stuff with your phone.
If you have an iPad or iPhone you can download an app which allows the
ATV to be controlled from these devices.

It has iOS4 as its operating system and I'm sure, like with the iPhone/iPad Apple will eventually
enable developers to build some cool stuff to go with ATV.

As for FLAC, I'm not holding my breath

Thank goodness for "Max" is all I can say.

[Cressy Snr]

A bit of development on the so-called "playlist bug"

Apparently it's not a bug it's a feature. Now where have I heard that before.
Here's what an Apple Discussion board mod had to say.

Just to be clear, on all your music playlists, if you click on a playlist to view the songs it will show them in alphabetical order.

HOWEVER, IF YOU DO NOT GO IN THE PLAYLIST TO SEE THE SONGS BUT HIT PLAY ON THE PLAYLIST ITSELF, IT WILL PLAY IN THE ORDER ON WHATEVER ITUNES YOU ARE STREAMING FROM.

I have seen a lot written about the "playlist bug" but its not a bug. It works.

However, the ATV shows the songs in order for two reasons:

1) Apple assumes if you have a playlist, you will manage it from your iTunes and thus you will simply hit play on the playlist to play it in order per my comment above. Thus, when you enter the playlist, Apple is using what it things will be the easiest default method for finding your songs which is alpha.

Why do this? Because again assuming they aren't expecting you to enter the playlist except to either find an album or artist, this would be the easiest way to do this, and then from there they assume you may want to find other songs or albums or create a Genius playlist from this artist, hence why you can hold down the play button and get those options.

2) This is version 1.0 of the software and as we know with Apple its not throw in all bells and whistles,but streamline and simple. Even if it means locking things down like being able to re-sort a playlist on the AppleTV

I don't necessarily agree, but it makes sense if you view it that way and also understand that Apple looks at this new gen of AppleTV as a streaming device, not as a device to manage your content.

Well that's alright then
Glad that one's cleared up.

Steve

[shane]

Lets hear it for British technology

Is it?

[Andrew]

ARM processor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture

We can still beat the world at some things. Sorry for the jingo-ism.