S1, Autonomic Launch Music Server With Remote Access

By Joseph Palenchar -- TWICE, 3/16/2010

New York - S1 Digital and Autonomic Controls have teamed up to offer what the companies call a first-of-its-kind music server whose music is backed up "in the clouds" for remote access from smartphones, PCs and game consoles.

The co-branded Autonomic Mirage Media Server by S1 Digital, available today at a suggested $3,995, also stores photos and streams music from the Pandora and SiriusXM Internet music services and from tens of thousands of Internet radio stations aggregated by RadioTime, said Michael deNigris, co-founder and CEO of Armonk, N.Y.-based Autonomics. The company plans to add access to more Internet music services, including LastFM and Spotify. Few music servers, he noted, stream music from the Internet.

The 1TB server features five independent audio outputs, four of them line-level and one of them optical digital. The 1.75-inch by 19-inch by 10-inch server is designed for integration with installed multi-room-audio systems and home-control systems.

The Mirage is built by S1, which also markets Gigabit-Ethernet-based A/V server systems, but Mirage incorporates software from Autonomics, a software-engineering company that licenses its two-way content-control applications to suppliers of media servers, home-control systems and multi-room-audio systems.

The Mirage is Autonomics's first branded hardware product for the residential-install market. Autonomics and S1 market the product, and S1 fulfills shipments.

The server is compatible with the MP3tunes music-locker service, enabling users to synchronize their Mirage content with the service's online storage locker. From the locker, users stream their music to broadband-connected devices loaded with free apps supplied by MP3tunes and third parties. Apps are available for PCs, laptops, iPhones and iPod Touches, Windows Mobile and Android-based smartphones, Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's Wii, deNigris said.

The Mirage lacks a CD drive to rip discs, but it networks with PCs and network-attached storage (NAS) devices to copy content for local storage. Available software enables a PC's iTunes and Windows Media programs to synchronize content automatically with Mirage and the online locker.

Supported audio formats include iTunes-protected AAC, WMA, FLAC and WAV.

The server also plays video stored on remote S1 media servers. It connects to TVs via HDMI1.3 and DVI, with component-video and VGA adapters available.

In a related announcement, S1 of Rochelle Park, N.J., said its multizone Windows Media Center-based Gigabit-network servers and single-zone players will ship in the next month or month and a half with HDMI 1.3a outputs, replacing HDMI 1.2 outputs. The upgrade supports Blu-ray Deep Color and native output of losslessly compressed Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-Master soundtracks to an A/V receiver or preamp processor, said S1 executive Paul Heitlinger.