The Tenuous Link

I have PC Aquarium Deluxe version 3.0, but I noticed in town today that there is now a PC Aquarium Deluxe 4. I looked on the distributers web site, and although the English language site only offers version 3, the German site has version 4.

I paid for and downloaded it. The installer was very broken and I had to randomly click several buttons without any clue what I was asking for! That's probably because my PC is configured for UK language settings, but the installer was designed for German speakers because I'd downloaded it from the German website. An empty fish tank then appeared on my screen, but it wasn't what I expected - it wasn't Aquarium Delux, it was Aqua Garden.

When I looked in the extracted files folder for my download pcaquariumdeluxe-4-win-de\Install\instbin\Software), there are acutally two installers, you can run the setup.exe files directly, and both run perfectly if you choose "English".

One is for PC Aquarium Deluxe 4, and the other is for Aqua Garden. Looks like I got a free aquarium then! My mouse won't work while Aqua Garden is running in full screen mode (beause I run Vista?), so I had to run the configuration (adding fish) in windowed mode. Aqua Garden has very nice tank designs, but the fish seemed to bob up and down a lot, like they weren't feeling very well. There is a review of Aqua Garden here, and I noticed that that site also has a Top 15 for aquarium screen savers.

I downloaded Sim Aquarium demo, the #1 rated aquarium, but although the sea-scape was very impressive, I thought the fish were a bit simple. So my favourite virutal aquarium is still PC Aquarium Deluxe, even though version 4 seems to be almost identical to version 3!

// posted by Steven @ 5:21 PM 0 comments

I've had this for a few weeks now - it's an Acoustic Energy "WiFi Radio":

Acoustic Energy are an outfit that I previously knew of for making large reasonably expensive loudspeakers. Apparently they also now see a future in small internet gadgets.

The software and computer hardware inside is supplied by a company called Reciva, who promote similar gadgets from other manufacturers on their web site. The case styling (and presumably the speakers) of this one are provided by Acoustic Energy, and they've squeezed a pair of little speakers in to the box. I think it looks quite smart - sort of like a little jukebox.

You can get all the technical specs and claimed feature list from the links above, here I'll just stick to what doesn't work ...

In brief the product aims to do two related things: Play live and recorded Real and WMA audio streams from the internet; and play MP3 and WMA files from a local network.

Audio Streaming

This really works quite well. The single rotary control lets you scroll quickly through a hierarchy of locations or genres to find stations. I have been listening to the 7-day archive of content made available by the BBC in the On-Demand mode. I can choose the programme I want to hear, the starting point in that program, and press play. There are options to pause, forward or rewind the streams during playback. Perfect.

For live radio, I stick to the Tivoli Model 1 that I also have in the kitchen. It is slightly cheaper than the AE WiFi radio, but is considerably nicer to listen to, and doesn't use up my meagre internet download allowance!

I'm not sure if there should be any advantage to choosing WMA over Real, but for the BBC streams that I've listened to the WMA bit rate is much lower than the Real stream, and the playback volume is also lower. Apart from a few experiments, I've stuck with the Real streams. The bit rate is typically 44kbps but drops in steps down to 11kbps, presumably when there is network congestion somewhere between the radio set and the BBC servers.

It is a testement to the relatively poor quality of the sound from this device that I hardly notice the drops in bit rate.

File Playback

In contrast to the "radio" function, playback of files from a computer on my local network is frustratingly broken. There are supposed to be two ways to play back files, either directly from CIFS/SMB (Windows) shares, or via a UPnP server.

I tried the network shares option first, but the AE WiFi Radio kept prompting me for a password to both the Windows XP and Windows Vista shares that I tried to connect to. I am not aware of any password being set for these, and I made sure that the Everybody user had full access to them. No joy.

Using the alternative option of UPnP to get to the music was more successful. Windows Media Player 11 configures access to files in this way, and the WiFi radio was able to see the shared files. In this case the music files could be browsed either by folder structure or genre, but adding a whole album of music is either a tedious process of adding files one by one, or accepting playback in alphabetical order.

Not that it really matters, because my device rarely manages to make it all the way through a song anyway. I've upgraded the WiFi Radio firmware (which took about an hour, compared to the advertised 15 minutes), and my wireless router firmware twice. No improvement.

Misc Problems

The sound quaility is not good, and I'm surprised AE are happy to put their logo on it. Why bother having two tiny stereo speakers so close together? The Tivoli Model One sounds much better with its single (larger) driver, and the unit is about the same size.

Another problem is that "wifi noise" breaks through in to the speaker output whenever data is required over the network (for instance at the beginning of a music file). Even if the speaker is "muted" because headphones/line-out socket is being used!

I suspect that my problems playing files from my local network are caused by brief disconnections from the WiFi network. I would love to be able to plug this in using an ethernet cable to confirm this, but there is no ethernet socket.

But it's convenient ...

I guess I sound pretty disappointed. Well I am, but it is very convenient, so it keeps it's place in the kitchen.

Labels: AE, Music, WiFi Radio

// posted by Steven @ 9:21 PM 3 comments