In reply to:

...I now see that you're talking about a way to specify a song directly to the receiver without messing with its user interface. .... I'm not sure why you would want this.


Well, in my new house (being built now), we've got in-ceiling speakers in a few rooms (living room, dining room, etc). My long-term plan is for those to be driven by an MP3 player in the basement server room, piped through a whole-house audio amplifier system. In order to play multiple different streams, I need multiple computers (or a single computer with many soundcards). I'm really not sure I can get a linux box to drive 4 or 5 different sound cards, each playing their own sound stream.

The Rio, however, makes perfect sense. Until I get a nice (and probably expensive) multi-source / multi-zone amplifier, I plan on putting a couple of my Rios in the basement, and would like to be able to control them from a web-like interface up in the kitchen (maybe on my iOpener). Basically, I'm planning on using it as a low-cost, remote music source.

There may well be an easy way to get 5 sound cards working in a box, I haven't tried -- but I suspect it might be cheaper to have 5 $100 Rios, instead. Now, in the long term, I might have to completely replace the player with my own app (like Jeff Mock's experimented with), but that's a last resort, 'cause I'd hate to lose (and hate even more to reprogram) local display information...