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Overall a great cheap way to enjoy your music collection straight from your PC to your home stereo. Use the latest software which apparently fixed many earlier issues that put people off. One of the big advantages is the ability to use higher bitrates for ripping music to maintain optimal quality. For example you can do a search within each music category using the remote keys to type in a name. Took a little while to get onto my wireless network, but now streams music into my hifi system flawlessly, giving me essentially a 200GB MP3 player.
You can also, by holding down the arrow buttons, fast forward through your music database. Not sure if they still make them but recommended if you can find one. User interface a bit primitive compared to latest colour screen portables, but it gets the job done and seems to have picked up the other playlists and favorite categories from my other media software. I picked one of these up at a local computer store last week for $39.00 and love it. Output seems a little low compared to the line out on my portable, but that can easily be adjusted by volume.
Since I did this original review I have picked up a second one off ebay and discovered some features I didn't know were there.
Just a terribly designed product and it wastes your time,freezes up all the time, and you lose all your playlistS and songs and have to reload,their outsourced c/s dept is a joke and give out erroneous info,save your money and avoid this netgear product.
It failed at streaming more than one song in a row from my PC. There are other alternatives that I'm told work much better.Oh yeah, I spent about 3 hours on the phone with Netgear tech support (sure sounded to me like everyone I spoke with was in India) and they were unable to solve the problem. About the only thing this media player was good for was connecting to Internet radio. It also doesn't have WPA security for the 802.11b so you're best to hard wire it.Since I don't think you can buy it anymore, I'm not sure what good this review is, but if you're thinking of getting a used one from somebody, I'd recommend you steer clear of the MP101.
now i just need to buy a 50 foot ethernet cable to run along the wall to my receiver than i can put the player on top of my audio reciever and plug in the redwhite to redwhite and bam 5.1 surround. lcd screen is bright and easy to see, control is very handy, no buttons on player, so my suggestikon do not lose the remote.all in all worth 37 dollars. i was like whoa amazing, i forgot to include taht i had installed the program in my laptop as well. so i go online find the firmware 3.7 ithink and i do all taht jazz than when i turn it on it finds my laptop and all my music i have there. i turn it on, it says wired network found, bam it has my netowkrs name, and sure enough all the songs i uploaded onto the program they gave me, were there. So I ordered this and surprisingly found this 250 dollar product for 30 dollars , i got standard shipping came in about 5 days, installed the cd to my desktop in my living room, which is where i have my roadrunner Cable modem, and my netgear Super g 108mbps wireless router, sothat all goes good, than i connect the player and i put the red and white audio cables in my reciever and i turn on the netgear, and it says found wireless network, it found it but when i tried to log on , nothing just this network not available, after finding it and putting the name of my network right there, so than i connect the short ole ethernet cable to the 2nd port on my router , and i connected the green audio cable that was going from my speakers to my computer , to the player. i was so releived thihnking i had wasted 37 dollars. so i had songs there on my laptop, and my moms songs on the desktop.
So when you have both the MP101 and the Windows Media Player (WMP) 11 on, the WMP will recognize the client and start streaming music to it. You can use any other software that can be installed as a server as long as it supports the UPNP. The interface is much better that the default server that netgear provides, since you can instantly see now whatever you have imported in the WMP library, including the fact that you can browse the music directories directly.Users with Windows XP can also download WMP11 to enjoy these features. Don't bother to use the CD. It also worked perfectly with my Rhapsody account. Two good examples are TwonkyMedia and Windows Media Player 11.Specifically, windows media player 11 (that comes with Vista) has a built-in UPNP server.
Given this setup, I connected the MP101 wired to my router and using WMP11 I never had any problems browsing and playing my music. Many of the problems that are being mentioned have to do with the server that netgear provides with the package. Don't even bother to download the new version from the netgear website because it has issues.The MP101 is a client that supports the UPNP protocol for streaming music. Then you go to the MP101 and acccept the WMP11 as a server.
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