2.3.2. Web Server Interface

The interface to the device is one area where I feel Turtle Beach has done a great deal of work in improving the user experience. Those who purchase the Audiotron now will never know what it was like previously using the software on the packaged CD. The included software was a little clunky to use.. From the webserver, you can control the following properties:
- Basic Music Control - such as Start, Stop, Forward, Rewind
- Group Control - Controlling what groups of music are being played
- Music Selection - Select the music files you wish to play
- Clock - Set the internal clock of the device - new as of 3.0
- Settings - File preferences, network preferences, History, Firmware updates

Home Page of the Audiotron Web Server	Setting up your preferences

The Web Server provides just about everything you would ever want to do or work with in controlling the Audiotron. If there was ever a device that could point the way to the future of integration of electronics and the internet, the Audiotron would be it. Can you imagine that in the not so distant future, all or most devices will have network connectivity with an interface controlled by a web browser? Then perhaps you can use a Tablet PC to control all your devices from afar. Sound far fetched? I think it's better than a remote!

I've included some snapshots of different actions that you can carry out with the Audiotron via the web interface. As I've said before, you can pretty much do everything remotely. In fact, you can start playing music from another room if you wanted to.

List Artists	List Albums

In configuring this unit, the most important step is to basically tell the Audiotron where your files are stored. You can search a number of shared directories of computers on your local network. For you Windows users, the Audiotron is a perfect fit for your environment. It knows how to traverse Windows shares but any other shares will not work for the Audiotron unfortunately. Since most of the consumer world is windows based, this isn't too bad. For a Linux box, you could always run Samba to share your directories (though I don't know the inner workings on this). You can specify up to 8 shared directories manually or you can tell the Audiotron to go out there and search all shares on all systems that it can find on your network. Since I had everything sitting on one file server in my home, all I had to do was manually set the Audiotron to point to that shared folder.

Setting up File Access Settings

2.3.4 Sharing files

Windows 9.x/Me
For Windows 9.x/Me, you will need to specify a password to access shares if you've password protected the folder.

Windows 2000/Windows XP
My own setup has all of my music sitting on a Windows XP box and thus you will need to provide more information in the form of a user ID. The Audiotron has a default user ID and password so you'll either need to create an account reflecting these settings or create an account with totally different settings and then update the Audiotron with the new user ID and password combinations. Of course the safer way to go is to customize the login/password combination and then update the Audiotron.

Searching for Songs	Searching for Hosts

Once the shared folders are specified, you can basically tell the Audiotron to go out there and check for new files. Audiotron will scan the shared folder and update it's internal database with all the information. Here's one annoying aspect of the Audiotron. It will not update it's database if files are no longer in the shared folder. Thus if you have a Britney Spears song when you first ran your file scan, and then later on, the file was deleted, a second update of the file check will not make a note of that disappearance. As such, you will see the song in the database but you will be unable to play it. In order to update this database from scratch, you will need to power cycle the device by flipping the switch at the rear of the device. Normally you can turn off the power (really a sleep mode) from the power button in the front. A little LED glows indicating that power is still running through the system. An interesting side effect is the fact that the web server is still running at this point so you can always open your browser to the server and play songs.

WOAH.. how many songs???

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