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

Monday, June 30, 2008

I hate shellfish, but I love LobsterTunes

I came across Lobster Tunes while searching for other ways to make Orb work with Windows Mobile. This program works really slick with any uPnP media streaming, even Windows Media Player 11.

It lets me search any of my directories that I have setup with Orb for music, and it lets me stream that file over the AT&T network (since the Blackjack II doesn't have WiFi). Great if I really need to listen to the podcast I don't have with me but I left at home.

It also plays files stored locally on the device or memory card, plus has a list of online radio stations ready to go, without having to mess with your bandwidth at home. It even plays my songs sideloaded from Napster with ease.

Looks like LobsterTunes is one shellfish I'm going to keep an eye on all the time!

Full review is here.

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posted by KDoel @ 8:25 PM