Wednesday, September 03, 2008

LobsterTunes review

It should come as no surprise that the lobster is among the most musically inclined members of the animal kingdom. (Actually, that should come as a total surprise, since we totally made it up.)
Perhaps Electric Pocket knows something special about these marine crustaceans that made them name their mobile music streaming utility LobsterTunes. (Could it be a B52s reference?) This $19.95 utility, used in conjunction with media server software running on a PC, will let you stream your music collection to your Internet-connected Windows Mobile device.

We put LobsterTunes on a Vista Home Premium system and used the built-in Windows Media Player 11 as our media server, though LobsterTunes also claims compatibility with other media servers, like TVersity, that support DLNA and UPnP. The LobsterTunes install wizard also installed a mobile client on our T-Mobile Dash (running Windows Mobile 6), and detecting the lack of necessary media encoding software, downloaded and installed Windows Media Encoder 9 on our Vista PC. Before taking to the road with the Dash, we first had to configure WMP 11 to share media with our mobile device. LobsterTunes doesn't do this for you automatically, but it does step you through the process.

When we fired up LobsterTunes on the Dash from the Wi-Fi hotspot at our local Panera, the software took only about ten seconds to locate and connect to our media server back home, aided by a UPnP-compatible router that automatically opens the appropriate network ports.

Full review here.

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posted by KDoel @ 1:03 PM