NetGear MP101NA

As of December 13, 2004, the Netgear MP101NA is NOT for the serious music fan for the simple reason that the software is not able to handle a large volume of CDs - say, more than 90 discs worth of music.

When you get to upwards of 1,400 song it justs shuts down and deletes any playlists you've created without any sort of warning ala "sorry, but you can't add any more songs."

With over 1,200 CDs in my collection, I had hoped to save them to the CPU -- which has had no trouble storing that quantity, listen to them through the MP101, and then create a whole lot of shelf space by selling those CDs that I don't listen to all the much.

The tech support, in India, is 24/7, free for the first 90 days and is actually pretty good, even though I wish those jobs were here in the US instead. They said that future versions (mine is the 3.3.36 one) will hopefully be able to handle greater quantities, and that I could download them for free from the Netgear homepage, but they were not able to give me a real idea if later versions would ever be able to handle the volume I'm talking about.

Otherwise, if you don't have that many CD's it's actually a pretty cool little toy as the display shows the song title, artist and CD title and will even "crawl" any lengthy info across the screen.

The wireless connection with the server worked immediately about 50% of the time, but was able to detect the server pretty quickly (1-2 mins) the rest of the time.

I had a firewall problem when I first set it up that was blocking transmission, but the tech guys walked me through the patch, no problems.

Like I said, this is a cute toy, but not a real tool for those who hope that technology can help them create any significant shelf space.

Purchased a NetGear MP101NA sound card when they first came out and have had a number of issue with it (which have now all be solved with firmware upgrades).

One of the things that really annoyed me was it continually loosing the network connection. I have now solved this by installing the UD Agent for cancer research. Link below:-

http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/

Basically, what this did was keep the PC connection open to the wi-fi network. I've now managed to have the MP101 up and running for over 30 hours continually playing internet radio.

Would also recommend you use Winamp 5 and the twonkyvision plugin for internet radio.

Excellent kit - now that its finally up and running.