Way back in 2008, I replaced my CD player with a Linn Majik DS music streamer. The DS connects to your router and music is streamed to it from your computer or network attached storage. Then all you need is a UPnP compatible control point to select the tracks you want to play.
Having auditioned the Majik DS against the Majik CD player, at a similar price point in Linn's range, it was clear the DS was sonically superior. For Windows PCs, the initial control point software supplied by Linn was called LinnGUI. Although it made it possible to browse the music collection on my NAS drive and select tracks to play, it was extremely basic. Once the music was playing, all was well, especially the sound quality, but the software had none of the polish you would expect the product at this price point. Indeed, its functionality fell short of Windows Media player. For example, after adding a track to a playlist, there was no way to use that track as the basis of an artist or album search.
A while later, Linn released much-improved software to control a Linn DS called KinskyDesktop. I was using KinskyDesktop on a netbook, which was less than ideal for this purpose - it's surprisingly inconvenient to pick up a netbook and fiddle about with it just to get some music to play even if it's always switched on and ready to go.
What I really wanted to control the Linn DS was a small handheld device. Once I got an Android smartphone, I waited to see if anyone would develop a control point application for a Linn DS. I was therefore very pleased to see that Bubble has developed BubbleDS for Android 2.1 and above. This app is priced at about £9 and can be downloaded from the Android Marketplace.
Once you've switched on wi-fi on your phone, you run BubbleDS. The first thing it does is search your Linn DS on the network and then you're presented with a simple screen with four tabs along the top, namely Now Playing, Playlist, Radio and Library.
The Library tab lets you browse the contents of your music server (in my case, a NAS drive running TwonkyMedia Server). You can search by album, all tracks, artist, folder or genre. A long press on an album, an artist name or an individual track brings up the usual Android contextual menu with options to play straightaway or add it to the playlist to play later. The Radio tab lets you play various radio Internet stations which isn't something I ever do.
Using the Playlist tab, you can see the tracks that have been selected to be played. A long press give you the option to clear the entire playlist, remove an individual track, find the album to which an individual track belongs (which the Linn supplied software is incapable of doing), or find all the albums by the artist of the selected track. Unsurprisingly, the Now Playing tab lets you see the current track being played and give you controls to play/pause and skip forwards and backwards through the playlist.
In use, the software itself is effective, stable and intuitive and a smartphone (or other similarly sized device) is an ideal way to control this kind of music system. With BubbleDS, Bubble have created a vastly superior alternative to Linn's KinskyDesktop software at a reasonable price. I think Linn could do a lot worse than supply a Linn-branded Android device (perhaps a small tablet) preloaded with BubbleDS with every Linn DS streamer that they ship.
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