Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge Closes the Home Audio Connection Gap

ADVISOR REVIEW

My wish seemed so easy to fulfill. I have a wonderful collection of digital music on my home PC. I want to listen to the music on my home stereo, but it's in another room. A simple wish, but for a long time, there was no easy way to do it.

Cisco Systems has come to my rescue with Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge WMB54G. This clever combination of hardware and software lets me -- and you -- wirelessly send any audio from any software on a Windows XP PC to a stereo system that is across the room or even across the house. You can send the sound from a music or media player, Internet audio, games, or whatever noises your PC can make.

There are other ways to play PC-based music on a stereo system. The simplest is to run a cable from the PC's audio output to the stereo's audio input, but that's often not practical, and long audio cables can degrade the sound (not to mention the spouse's attitude). For instance, long cable capacitance can reduce high frequencies, long cable resistance can weaken the signal, and a long run of typical unbalanced cable can pick up noise.

Another approach is to use a "media player". Several companies make devices that stream audio files from a PC via a network cable (or Wi-Fi wireless) using the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol. These devices have merit for some situations. To help you control a back-room PC from the living room, a media player might give you a display that show what's playing, and a remote control to change songs or even select playlists. Some media players connect to your TV to display your music library, and the newest models promise to stream video too, though often with restrictions -- no DVDs, for instance.

But media players are a bit costly and complex to configure. And you might be forced to use only the often-mediocre media software comes with the media player, because "Universal Plug and Play" is more theory than truth. I had a decent solution using a Netgear MP101 device, but it do all the cool things I wanted, it's been discontinued.

Wireless-G Music Bridge

While a media player pulls music files across the network, Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge pushes the audio across the network using what it calls a virtual audio driver, which replaces the normal Windows sound driver when you're using WMB. It's important to understand the difference. A media player directly plays your music files -- or not, since many music file formats (notably the format used by Apple iTunes) are not usable by most players. In contrast, Wireless-G Music Bridge sends any audio from the PC to your stereo. It doesn't care about your music file formats, or your media player's capabilities. If the software on the PC makes noise, WMB can send that sound to your stereo.

To do this, you install Wireless-G Music Bridge software on your Windows PC, connect the WMB54G device to your stereo, and communicate between them via your home network. You can and should use wired Ethernet if convenient, but the big benefit is to use a wireless connection. The Wireless-G Music Bridge device has a built-in Wi-Fi 802.11g radio; if your home network has a Wi-Fi access point you're good-to-go. However, in my house I use a convenient wired connection. It's not smart to use Wi-Fi if wired is an easy option; why load down the wireless network unnecessarily?

Windows Vista users, beware. It appears that software Cisco provides with the Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge works fine with Windows XP, but not at all with Windows Vista. (I didn't test it with pre-XP Windows.) Cisco could issue Vista-compatible software, but as of August 2007 there's no indication on Linksys.com that this is going to happen.

The product has printed quick-start instructions, and a User Guide in PDF format on the included CD and at Linksys.com. Setup of WMB54G is straightforward using the "wizard" program on the CD, which walks you through the connection and configuration steps, installs the special audio driver that directs sound to WMB, and also installs a utility program so you can control where the sound is sent. However, the software on my CD has been superceded by improved software available by download from Linksys.com.

If you want to use WMB54G wirelessly, you first must connect it via Ethernet cable to configure the SSID and WEP or PSK encryption to match your existing Wi-Fi network. The instructions say you must connect your PC directly to WMB for initial setup, but I didn't have to. My network uses the common IP address block 192.168.1.x, and WMB's default address is 192.168.1.210, so I connected it to an available network port and my PC could "see" it just fine. (It's unfortunate that various network device manufacturers use different default IP address ranges, for no reason other than to make it a big hassle to intermix brands.)

You can also use a "Web-based Utility" by connecting directly to the WMB54G's IP address with a Web browser. This lets you examine and in some cases alter information that is not available through the simpler WMB utility. This is also how you install an upgrade to WMB's firmware.

Getting going

After WMB is configured by your PC, move the Wireless-G Music Bridge box to your home stereo location, connect it to an available stereo input using the supplied RCA-connectors audio cable, or your own coax or optical digital audio cable, and plug in its power adapter. Blue lights on the front tell you that it has power, and an Ethernet and/or Wireless connection. That's nice, but unfortunately, the lights don't indicate the most crucial information: that there is communication between WMB software and hardware.

Once installed, Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge is very simple to use, almost. If you set it to load when Windows starts, you have an icon in the Windows system tray for the WMB utility that lets you select where your audio goes: to your PC's speakers, or to the remote WMB54G at your stereo. But before using your WMB, you must select which WMB to use.

I expect Wireless-G Music Bridge to be used mainly in homes, a single device connecting PC to stereo, and that's how Cisco pitches it. But the WMB utility assumes you have a network of WMBs and regularly switch among them. So, using the original software, each time you start your WMB software, you must choose which device to use, even if there's only one on your network. The updated software remembers the last device so it's a bit more convenient to start up.

Unfortunately, you can stream to only one WMB at a time, so if you have multiple stereo systems in different parts of your house or yard, you can't send your music stream to all of them. If Cisco would address this, they'd sell more devices to each customer!

Once I selected my "one of one" WMB device and music started flowing from my stereo, I was thinking, "this is cool" -- until I found another glitch to chill my enthusiasm. I couldn't switch the audio destination! Actually, I could, but not the way I expected or desired.

Under the covers, Wireless-G Music Bridge switches audio from the PC's speakers to the remote WMB device by changing the audio driver Windows is using. Open the WMB utility, click your desired audio destination, and WMB changes the current audio driver on-the-fly -- a slick trick! Cisco doesn't explain this in the User Guide, but you can see it by opening your PC's Audio properties and checking the name of the current audio driver (you might need to close and reopen the properties to see a change). The WMB54G driver is "C-Media Wi-Sonic Wireless Audio", presumably named for the company that developed the technology.

However, on my test PCs, using my two main media software programs, the audio stream didn't move to a new destination when I clicked, even though the audio driver was switched immediately. Testing via the Sounds tab of Windows Audio properties dialog, WMB worked as expected; I could instantly switch the test sounds from the PC's speakers to my stereo in the next room and back again.

But using Microsoft Windows Media Player, or my favorite and highly-recommended media management/player program, J. River Media Center (http://jrmediacenter.com), the sound didn't switch; it either continued to play where it was, or the sound stopped. The audio never switched back and forth as it should.

Using the original software, the workaround is to make the switch using Wireless-G Music Bridge, then close and restart the media software -- not at all convenient (polite way of saying "huge hassle").

The problem was with the software Cisco provided in the box on the setup CD. Many months later I was able to solve this problem by going to Linksys.com and getting newer software. Download WMB Utility version 1.2.1, dated Dec 7, 2006. Installing it requires uninstalling the original software, and it took three tries to get the new version installed and running. But it is worth doing.

Without the updated software, using Wireless-G Music Bridge is a tad clunky. Restarting software is always time-consuming, as is locating and re-selecting whatever you intended to play. And it's not feasible to set up and preview a temporary playlist on the PC, then smoothly switch it to the living room stereo, because the necessity of restarting the media software will lose the temporary playlist.

Before the new software became available (and I happened to find it), I queried Cisco's support, who seemed clueless. They suggested I reinstall the software and try it on other PCs, which I'd already done and told them before they provided this all-purpose "solution." Then they stopped responding to my attempts to deepen the discussion; so much for "support." My hunch was that Cisco support didn't know much about the device but wouldn't admit it.

While the product's documentation says little about how it works, and doesn't mention any advanced capabilities on the audio side, there's a mysterious but appealing statement in the Wireless-G Music Bridge marketing info on Linksys.com: You can "choose what audio content from your PC you want to play over your audio system. For example, you can choose to send music but not email alerts or other PC tones." Sounds good, but I don't find this mentioned in the User Guide, and I don't see any way to control this in the WMB utility or the Web utility. Perhaps this is possible if a particular media player program allows selection of an audio driver separate from the active Windows audio driver. Or maybe it's a feature that was planned but not implemented in WMB's software.

Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge software also has equalizer and special effects options, but I avoid these, since my goal is to hear the music as recorded, not altered or gimmicked.

I had three items on my wish list, not bad for a 1.0 release. Two are fixed if the updated software is installed.
+ Remember previously selected device -- fixed via update.
+ Switch audio destination on-the-fly -- fixed via update.
+ Allow streaming to multiple WMB devices simultaneously -- still not possible.

Get one!

There are other devices that fill the need in other ways, so I'm not able to say this is the "best" choice; it depends on needs, environment and budget. But for the price, and with the updated software, I'm quite happy to have added Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge WMB54G to my home entertainment network. My music goes where I want it to go. And because there are some interesting business and mobile uses too -- think of sending laptop audio to a PA sound system, or to a friend's stereo at a party, or music across the office -- I already have reasons to buy more!

http://www.linksys.com
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