A lot of the problems people seem to be having appear to be related to the settings on the their computers. This is beyond the control of Linksys and reviewers should be cautious not to slam Linksys because of their personal firewall software or home Active Directoy labs don't allow file sharing.

Yes the screen is too big, I wish it played movies, and it was a little confusing to setup at first, but it does what it advertises and I enjoy nothing better than putting my entire WMA collection on random and my entire "My Pictures" folder on random and enjoying the show for the evening.

I guess with that said, WMA's sound WONDERFUL on this unit, I don't use MP3, so your mileage may vary.

First Impressions:

Nice packaging. Nice looking device, it's not much bigger than a four port hub. It has both the Cisco and LinkSys logos on the face. Vertical or horizontal mount. The package contained the device, quick setup poster, and a CD.

Installation:

I have an existing server, running Win2K Server, that I store my MP3 collection on. This product works by installing an agent on a PC and then connecting the device over a hard wired LAN or WiFi (802.11b). My setup allows me to use either LAN or WiFi and of course I chose the wired setup for max bandwidth and so I could actually listen to music and use my phone or microwave without dropping packets and thus songs. The agent installation was flawless and the media adapter and my server were talking within a few minutes after cracking up the box. Once the agent is installed on a PC, you really only have one option: Point the agent to your media. So of course I decided to point it to my entire (29 gig) mp3 collection which began in a single MP3 folder. Well, it starts to "Search" and then simply would disappear. No error, no nothing. Ok, maybe my collection was too big, so I start dragging my genre folders which were maybe 1 gig a piece...same thing happend. Ok...so I decide to drag a single album over to the agent and finally it seems to take the 6 songs in the folder and I rush over to my TV to fire up the device...it was able to play three of the songs and then the entire folder disappeared and thus I had no music to pull up anymore. After a few reboots and trying different folders I had similar results. My trade, I'm an IT guy...so there were no 'technical user' issues...I can assure you of that. To this day the device is flakey. It forgets entire folders for no reason at any given time. I've even loaded XP with similar results.

Audio:

The sound is on par with my expectations, though I wish for the price the device would have at least coax digital out. Your stuck with a pair of RCA, which I hooked a pair of Monster cables up to for optimal sound. The unit is equipped with an Intel StrongArm 400 MhZ (The same processor the latest PocketPCs use) and thus is pretty good at decoding and playing the MP3/WMAs.

Display:

The menus are sloppy. There is absolutely no customization on for menus either. There are NO visualizations while songs are playing. You can't see anything important like bit rate or most of an ID3 tag (genre, year, etc.). You are stuck with an unsizable screen that shows you the track name and album name and running time. That's it. Plus they use such a huge display, that a band or song title with a long name (13 chars +) gets lopped off. Sloppy stuff all around on the visuals. Again, I expect more.

Photos:

Photos are displayed well. No real problems here. The device sure could flip through them faster though with this processor. One plus is the ability to play MP3s while viewing photos. However, some lag does occur on larger photos. Whether this is due to bandwidth, processor, or a combination I'll leave up to the "engineers" over at Linksys to figure out and hopefully fix over the next decade or so...

Support:

This is where the stars began to seriously dive. ... I doubt the engineers who designed this paper weight released this as a stable product under their free will. It's a joke.

Conclusion:

... I would recommend looking at the new Gateway DVD/MP3 network device or waiting as this market opens up more. We will all want to stream over DivX movies, MP3s, and every other type of media soon. I'm just going to wait a few years while they refine this technology better.

First, I don't want to have to turn on my TV in order to listen to music. Second, the thing was a pain to set up. Third, I have a fairly large collection of MP3s, and browsing through it with the Linksys interface was really cumbersome. The LinkSys software is rudimentary, you can't create playlist or really your manage your music. The photos feature is a neat trick, but it's not something I really care about. If you really want easy access to your music library, this isn't the product for you.

I've been spoiled, I guess, with my Slim Devices SLIMP3 Network Music Player. In comparison, the open source SLIMP3 software provides a super easy-to-use remote control interface using the very bright and readable built-in display. Additionally, you can browse, search and create playlists from any web browser on your home network with the SLIMP3. You have to use another program to do this with the Linksys device.

Finally, the Linksys works only on Windows XP, but the SLIMP3 works on Mac, Windows 98/ME/NT/2000 and XP, Linux and a bunch of other operating systems.

The downside of the SLIMP3 is that it's not wireless, but I use one of mine with a wireless bridge and the other is connected right to an ethernet port on my DSL router.

So the Linksys is going back and I'm ordering another SLIMP3 for the house.

p.s. My experience with Linksys support was laughable. The wait was long and the support guy at the other end was clueless. Luckily, I was able to figure out how to set up the thing myself. The knowlegeable folks at Slim Devices answered my questions quickly and efficiently (of course, I should have read the FAQ on their web site first...) They rock!

For classical music, the Artist / Album / Song hierarchy doesn't make much sense, especially since the PC software insists on putting the composer in both Composer and Artist, and ignoring the actual conductor, orchestra, soloists, etc.

Tech support, as others have noted, is worth what you pay for the call, i.e. nothing. These guys know literally nothing about the product; they're just trained to look up something on a screen and parrot it back to the caller.

Finally, there's no screen saver, and the fixed portions of the display don't move or change color. I'm worried about burn-in on my expensive rear-projection system.

I said could be because the software that comes with the Media Adapter is hideous. The most elementary of free media packages are a 100 times better. The software doesn't allow you to view or play MP3's by Album. Instead you get to choose by artist, song or genre. Excuse me but cross colloboration by various artists makes it impossible to listen to an entire album. You only get to listen to the songs on a album that were performed soley by the artist.

How about listening to one song while choosing another? Forget about it. Choosing a new song before the other has stopped playing means you jump to the new song. What happened to listening to songs like I did with my ancient history 45's?

Want to listen to a playlist? Fine but don't hope to create one on the fly. Can't do it. I can go on about chopped titles and names but I won't.

The product is a wonderful idea that went astray with the software people. Please LinkSys, release new software!

Got the unit to boot and register (even on wireless after remembering to edit the MAC filter table - by the way, am I the only one who thinks it's weird to show the WEP key in cleartext on the TV setup, even after you saved the info?) but both the user interface and server side application need work in my opinion.

First the user interface: With an iPod I need all of 5 keys and a scrollweel to control everything MP3. With this remote there are 13 relevant keys. I find myself pressing back when I mean previous and right arrow when I mean page down. Will probably get used to it, but this looks like user interface design by techies.

Then the PC app. It's probably my files, but the media manager chokes on them, leaving a half-built database. Whenever something goes awry, the databse shows double, triple or wrong entries, and there is no way to solve it than un- and reinstall. Can't see why a file was not added, can't edit the databse manually. This behaviour is seriously worrying, looks like the app needs some more testing.

As for JPG file browsing I can't fault the unit. Be aware though it looks like it creates thumbnails for all your pictures. If you have a large number of them, the "cache" folder has a lot of entries and takes up a considerable amount of space on your C drive (no way to tell the install to put stuff like this somewhere else).

All in all a great product, especially if it reads your MP3 collection without problems, but it needs some software updates before I'll recommend it to others.

Did I have to use the setup menu? Oh yeah. What should have been an easy setup turned out to be about 3 hrs of poring through documentation and XP. I spent over an hour with support on the phone. They have no clue and finally told me to send it back. At that point I became more determined than ever to make it work myself. At 2 am I made a change under the networking configuration of XP "to allow connections from other users" or something like that. Bingo! Up and running. Like I said it should have been easy, I had XP pro running on all my networked computers and the 802.11b wireless running flawlessly. It may be something I had inadvertantly changed, but the support line should have been more knowledeable. Alls well that ends well.

Very sorry to see Linksys have such a poor roll-out for a product.

If anybody knows how to resolve the infamous "Waiting For Host" message, please let us all know by posting another review here.

The installation is a little non-intuitive (as mentioned on other reviews). Even if you plan on using it in wireless mode, you might want to configure it while in wired (not wireless) mode. With the default settings out of the box I never could get the setup software to completely detect the adapter in wireless mode (it would claim to find it, but would then not list it for configuration). When I direct wired the adapter to my router it found the adapter and permitted configuration. Oddly enough, you can have the adapter in wired mode but configure it for wireless. In fact this was the only way I could get it to work.

I didn't pay close enough attention during the wireless configuration section and kept the default setting of "Ad-hoc" for network "Mode" rather than "Infrastructure". Infrastructure applies if the adapter will connect to a router rather than to a computer. Since I did not set this configuration correctly, when I connected the adapter to my TV and powered it up the configured adapter never found my wireless network. The TV just displayed "Waiting for host" with 92% signal strength. Once I figured out my mistake I re-ran the setup program (with the adapter direct wired)and changed the wireless mode to infrastructure. Problem solved. Even works with full 128 bit WEP and MAC address filtering on my router. You can change the WEP key (and a host of other settings) from the remote using the "setup" menu over the TV.

My only complaint to date is the playlist support. It supports m3u and asx formats. It would be nice if it natively supported Windows Media Player. You can export a playlist from Windows Media Player into m3u format, but its an extra step and a hassle.

Performance wise, the pictures were clear and the sound was great with my 192 bit-rate mp3s. I could push the host computer hard on other tasks while the adapter was running a slideshow of over 2000 pictures and playing from a 253 song playlist. No hiccups at all.

Improvements should include clearer wireless mode installations and better playlist support. The host software requires XP and it installed some .NET components. I was surprised to see these components sucking up > 120MB of RAM. Better memory management would help.

Overall I am pleased with the product.

I called tech support, they responded after about 1/2 hour and were no help their suggestion was that the box was broken and to return it! It was clear that he had no training on the product. I asked them to escalate the problem, and a guy with real experience called me back within 1/2 hour and he talked me through the wired set up. He still owes a call back on wireless (although I may be ahead of him) There is no help on the linksys web site for this product.

The product performance is good now that it is working, although after it had been playing for a hour or so, it dropped the connection and needed to be power cycled, I also noticed a couple of gaps of about 20 seconds or so in the music - if that is common then it will be a pain.

Linksys do need to ship some software (or at least make recommendations) to manage playlists. RealAudio play lists don't work, Windows media player play lists need to be exported, MusicMatch's seem to work - but you need to search hard to find them. It would be much better to be able create playlists from the TV interface.

This is much to geeky - OK for a geek like me, but I can't see my wife using it.

My advice is to wait.

I managed to get the problem resolved myself, and the product does work as planned, but I would suggest spending the extra bucks and getting a Turtle Beach Audiotron instead. I wish I had.

I have now upgraded to XP, which I was planning to do anyway, and the Media Adapter is working. Unfortunately, it was a nightmare to get running, and I spent a total of 3 hours on the phone with technical support. I have a Linksys WRT54G router, and the Media Adapter couldn't detect it's signal. After changing the SSID, altering the encryption settings, turning off MAC filtering, and a host of other fixes, the final solution was to change the RTS Threshold to 2304. I know a fair amount about my router, but the RTS Threshold was one setting that I know nothing about and always left alone. If you are getting 00% signal strength, you may want to try this fix.

The Media Adapter itself works wonderfully, and I am very pleased with the quality of photo display (3MP pictures don't look at all pixelated). My only complaint here is that the music navigator isn't great: it includes the track number at the beginning of the song name, so the song order is strange (this is probably caused by using the filename rather than Tag information to derive the song name). Overall, great product, but there are costs to being an early adopter.

However, once the installation was complete - I fell in love with it instantly (hence my 4 stars). It is definitely worth its price tag. The connection to my 802-11b network was flawless - i have it connected to my home theater receiver and i finally feel as if my huge collection of mp3's have been freed from their computer prison. This product is highly recommended.

One of the nice features was being able to manipulate the volume of the music without having to use your stereo remote. Also the shuffle and music/picture selection screens were extremely easy to navigate. On top of that I was able to slideshow through pictures while listening to the music at the same time. One of the first things I noticed when viewing pictures was the excellent quality in comparison to a majority of the scan-converters out there. Extremeley crisp and from what I witnessed, flicker-free. Very vivid!

A recommend for anyone out there setting up a Wireless Home Gateway that wants to have those "precious family" photos and music favs at your fingertips at the drop of a hat. Great for holiday reunions for sharing pics with guests.

If they ever come out the the "G" version of this puppy I'm first in line.

Reception and signal for the unit was exceptional in the fact that my wireless access point was clear on the other side of the house to where my TV/family room is. Had a 70% signal strength from around 80+ feet away and there was no noticable signal drop at all when playing MP3/WMA files.