New York –
and
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
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.
