You might be familiar with Sonos’ high-quality music gear, which lets you stream tunes anywhere in your home over its own Wi-Fi network. The new S5 is a set of self-contained powered speakers that can expand an existing system or serve as the starting point for a new one. Intriguingly, the S5 lets you take a pass on Sonos’ effective (but pricey!) $349 dedicated remote, offering a free iPhone app to control all your Sonos gear.
The S5 works with existing Sonos hardware or on its own as a standalone unit. If this is your first Sonos device, you’ll connect it with an Ethernet cord, streaming music through a wired network. You can cut that cord, but you’ll have to add a Sonos’ ZoneBridge ($99) to go Wi-Fi. We wish the S5 could directly connect to our established Wi-Fi network, but maybe Sonos is right in isolating itself–music streaming always felt snappy and responsive.
We tested the S5 over both of those connection options, and the included Mac utility got everything singing in minutes, pointing the player to your iTunes files or other sources. It works with all major audio formats, including MP3, AAC, WMA, Apple Lossless, WAV, Audible, and more. You can simultaneously scrape together several music libraries from different computers or even connect directly to a network hard drive without leaving any Macs running. And the S5 plays a multitude of internet sources, including streaming radio stations, Slacker, Pandora, Napster, and Rhapsody.
Use the S5 to wirelessly beam your iTunes tracks anywhere.
The S5 sounds excellent, cramming great fidelity into a small space. While its small size offers limited stereo separation, its two tweeters, two midrange drivers, and one bass driver work in concert to create a complete tonal range at any volume. The S5 is loud enough to power an impromptu party, or you could use its sleep timer to gently help you nod off without sacrificing audio clarity at low volumes.
Several extra features are useful in certain situations. A headphone jack lets you listen alone, while an audio-input minijack turns the S5 into an instant iPod speaker. If you own other Sonos hardware, you can even stream audio from that input to other networked gear in different rooms.
The iPhone app interface quickly queues tracks, launches playlists, and otherwise navigates the S5. It includes nearly every feature as the dedicated remote; we didn’t miss anything. You’ll turn to the Mac software for the deepest preference control–such as resetting the wireless network channel–or you can use the Mac interface as another controller. We wish, however, that Sonos didn’t cause confusion by placing important iPhone app preferences, alarm features, and other settings behind the Music button.
We liked the S5 and applaud the ability to control it with your iPhone. Still, Sonos’ dedicated controller beats the iPhone, hands down. With the iPhone, you’ll first have to fish out your phone and launch the Sonos app. It can then take 5 to 10 seconds to load and connect to the S5. If your phone goes to sleep, it’ll take a few seconds to reconnect, and once in a while, we had to completely relaunch the app because of an error. Essentially, the iPhone remote strips away some of the usual it-just-works Sonos magic… though it’s hard to complain too much about a free app.
Imagine hearing your iPhone loud and clear, without using earphones or powered speakers. AirCurve turns your iPhone into a no-power-drain alarm clock on your nightstand, or a mini sound system that never needs batteries or adapters. This cleverly designed acoustic amplifier for your iPhone collects the sound from the built-in speaker of your iPhone, amplifies [...]
Bring Internet radio from around the globe to a stereo near you.
Back in the day, people listened to the radio all the time, and families would gather ’round it in the evenings, and it was all a very big deal–um, so we’re told. Today it’s easy to look at radio as a last resort, the old standby when you forget your iPod or there’s no computer around for firing up Pandora. Fans of radio will appreciate the Aluratek WiFi Internet Radio, Home Theater Edition, aka the AIREC01F (another tech product whose name just rolls off the tongue).
The Aluratek connects to your stereo or powered speakers with RCA cables, then connects to your network over Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Entering our wireless network’s case-sensitive password with the remote’s numeric keypad was frustratingly slow and error-prone. But once you’re connected, you can scroll through the stations by location, genre, and so on, in pages of 100, and add them to your favorites list. We were blown away by the huge selection: every kind of music, TV audio (in case you feel like listening to some C-SPAN), news, sports, even scanner channels. You can listen in on NASA’s Mission Control, for example.
Video may have killed the radio star, but Internet radio is helping resurrect it.
For search capabilities, not to mention easier browsing, you can log in to aluratek.vtuner.com with your device’s vTuner ID and interact with the stations list–even add new stations that aren’t listed already. You can manage your favorites list from here too.
To play music from a USB drive, connect it to the port in back and select Media Player mode. Browsing with the remote is simple, but iTunes-standard AAC files (ending in .m4a or .m4p) aren’t supported, only MP3, WAV, or Mac-unfriendly WMA files.
The Aluratek is a UPnP-compatible device, so it should be able to read music stored on a Universal Plug-n-Play server. But the manual recommends PC-only software for hosting the server. To run a UPnP server on our Mac, we installed Elgato’s EyeConnect ($49.95, www.elgato.com) after not having luck getting the Aluratek to work with Playback ($15, yazsoft.com) or Connect360 ($20, www.nullriver.com). EyeConnect lives in your System Preferences, lets you share music from iTunes or anywhere else on your Mac, and works with the Aluratek. Browsing our iTunes playlists with the Aluratek’s remote, however, was a less than satisfying experience, with big lags between screens.
The colors, the colors! We chose blue, but dang does it pick up fingerprints.
The fifth-gen iPod nano arrived in our offices yesterday, and we can’t
stop playing with the cute little thing! Here’s our first look; full
review to follow in an upcoming issue of Mac|Life.
Setting Up: VoiceOver
Setup asked us if we want to install VoiceOver, saying, "With the press of a button hear your song, artist, and playlist names. iTunes will download and install the VoiceOver Kit." We went ahead with the install, thinking we could control the nano via the headphones, like with the button-less iPod shuffle.
No dice, however. The nano doesn’t include the Apple Earphones with Remote and Mic (which come with the shuffle), or, obviously, the more-expensive In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic. So while you can press the Center button once at the Now Playing screen to hear the currently playing artist and song name announced, you can’t actually control your music or playlists with the headphones unless you buy one of those compatible sets.
But anyone can use the Spoken Menus feature (it’s a Universal Access thing) to hear every menu item spoken, no matter what headphones or speakers you’re using.
Built-In Speaker
The fifth-gen nano is the first to have a built-in speaker, and you can use it to listen to your songs or videos, but it’s teeny-tiny and beyond tinny. It’s great for playing the audio of videos you shot with the nano itself, so you can show a few people your video on the nano’s screen and they won’t need to take turns with the earbuds to hear the audio.
You can’t use the speaker to play the radio, however. The radio only works with a pair of headphones plugged in, because the headphones’ wire acts as the antenna. You can’t even play the radio if your nano is connected to a set of powered speakers that use the Dock connector — it has to be headphones.
Radio
Speaking of the radio, let’s talk about that next. To tune the radio, press the Center button to bring up the radio dial, then use the clickwheel to browse through it. While the dial is displayed, you can also press the Previous and Next buttons to seek stations, or hold the Next button to scan for stations. (Press Center to stop scanning.)
You can pause live radio by pressing the Pause button. (If you can still see the radio dial, you’ll need to press Center first, then Pause.) To resume from the point where you paused, just press Play, but you can also scrub through your paused radio with the Fast-Forward and Rewind buttons. You can’t save the recorded radio permanently, and the paused radio is cleared if you keep it paused for 15 minutes, turn the nano off (duh), change the station, play non-radio media, or if the battery is dying.
Pressing and holding the Center button while the radio is playing brings up a contextual menu letting you add the station to your favorites, or tag the song, if the radio station supports iTunes Tagging. (You can tell this at-a-glance if the currently playing song’s name is displayed along with the radio station’s station ID.) Tagging a song adds it to your Tagged Songs list, and then when you dock your nano, that list is transferred to iTunes, where it shows up in the sidebar under the iTunes Store. Click the Tagged Songs list to preview the songs and buy them in iTunes.
Pedometer
The built-in pedometer is found under Extras > Fitness. When you turn the Pedometer on and pocket your nano, it counts the steps you take until you turn the pedometer off or dock the iPod. You can set your Daily Step Goal in the Settings, as well as your current weight, which lets the pedometer calculate how many calories your steps have burned. The settings also let you leave the pedometer turned on all the time. (A little shoe icon at the top-left of the screen lets you know if it’s on or not.)
When you dock, iTunes will ask if you want the data sent to Nike+. You can send your data over before you even have a Nike+ account, then just click Visit in the pop-up dialog to go to the site and create an account. The site’s default goal is to climb a 100-story skyscraper, and it adds up all the steps you take in progress to that 4,500-step goal.
The Nike+ Active site tracks our progress up this skyscraper. We’ve taken 95 of 4,500 steps so far…um, where’s the elevator?
Next page: The video camera, voice memos, contextual menus, and more…
Video Camera
We were really pleased with the quality of the video camera, but it can be tricky to hold the nano while shooting without inadvertantly getting your fingers in the way. Luckily you can shoot in portrait or landscape mode, and whichever way you hold the nano the video will be right-side-up on the screen.
The camera does video only, no still images. Press and hold the Center button with the video camera app open for a selection of fun filters, including Sepia, Black & White, X-Ray, Film Grain, Thermal, Security Cam, Cyborg, Bulge, Kaleido, Motion Blur, Mirror, Light Tunnel, Dent, Stretch, and Twirl.
iPod nano formats recorded videos as VGA video H.264 w/AAC 30 fps files. Videos are synced to iPhoto, not iTunes, and they show up as .mp4 files. (A one-minute video is about 20MB.) In iPhoto, you can double-click a video to play it in a QuickTime window. Right-click a video and select Show File to see where it’s kept in the Finder, in case you want to edit or convert it.
We tried to upload videos to Facebook and Flickr from iPhoto’s built-in uploaders, but iPhoto only uploaded stills (the first still in the video). And the videos never show up in iTunes unless you move them there manually. You can put them in an iPhoto album and sync them to your iPod by telling iTunes to keep that album synced.
Contextual Menus
Pressing and holding the Center button brings up extra menus depending on what’s on the iPod’s screen. For example:
- From a Radio screen, you get the option to add the current song to your Tagged Songs list, and the current station to your Favorites list.
- In the Video Camera, you see the special effects filters.
- In the Now Playing screen, the extra menu lets you view the scrubber bar and scroll through a track, create a Genius playlist, shuffle songs, rate the current song, or display the lyrics if you entered them in the song’s metadata in iTunes.
Voice Memos App
The Voice Memos app looks and works just like the one now included with the iPhone. Press the Center button to record, then gab away while the built-in mic picks up your voice. Press the Center button again to insert a chapter marking in your recording. And press Pause when you want to stop.
Your recording is saved to a list of date-stamped voice memos, and you can choose to label it a Podcast, Interview, Lecture, Idea, Meeting, or Memo, to help you differentiate between recordings later. The recordings are automatically synced back to your iTunes when you dock.
Miscellaneous Observations
Other than those all-new features, the new nano is pretty similar to the last version. It’s got a svelte, shiny case that’s pretty bad for picking up fingerprints. Its curved screen packs a few more pixels than the last generation’s. Dock connector and headphone jack on the bottom; Hold switch on the top. And a few more things we noticed about it:
It doesn’t come with Apple’s $29 USB Power Adapter, just a cable. But any USB-compatible AC charger will work.
You can add lyrics in plain text to a song’s metadata in iTunes, and then view those lyrics on your nano while the song is playing.
Genius Mixes need to be added to your iPod nano from iTunes. You can’t add them if you manage your music manually, only if you use the syncing features. To add them, select the nano in the iTunes sidebar, click the Music tab, and select the Genius Mixes while you’re telling iTunes what music to sync.
You can shake to shuffle to a new song, but this doesn’t turn the shuffle feature on for good. Shake-to-Shuffle is automatically disabled when the Hold switch is activated, and you can also turn it off in Settings > Playback > Shake.
