Escient’s FireBall Music Manager is a dedicated music server hardware device. Escient on Thursday announced the release of FireBall-PC, free software which enables Mac and PC users to share the contents of their hard disks with the FireBall Music Manager as well.
The FireBall Music Manager is available in capacities from 80GB to 400GB. It connects to your home entertainment system using RCA and digital audio connectors as well as S-Video, composite or component video connectors. The device also plugs into your home computer network, providing a central way to store and access music and other digital entertainment. Some systems feature internal hard drives and CD-RW drives to rip or burn music on the fly. Also included is free Internet radio, network file sharing, stream support, a PDA Web interface, gapless song playback and many other features.
FireBall-PC lets you specify one or more music files on a Mac or PC to share with any FireBall device on the network. Your Mac’s music folder will then appear on the FireBall’s onscreen menu as an additional music server. Music from your computer is then streamed to the FireBall over the network.
The software lets you add any songs to custom playlists, “Favorites” or genres you define yourself, regardless of where the song file is actually located.
FireBall-PC also supports Escient’s DVDM-100 and SE-D1 DVD management systems, the MP-150 and MP-200 digital media players, none of which have their own internal hard disk storage.
The software requires a free automatic update to FireBall Media Managers and Mac OS X v10.4 or later. The computer needs to be on the same network as the FireBall Media Manager. The song files must have valid ID3, ASF or Ogg-style tags in order to be recognized by the FireBall’s Music Guide.