The Sooloos Music Server

I Have Seen the Future

Unfortunately, Sooloos has no provision for importing LPs, SACD, or DVD-Audio. The Sooloos hardware platform is, however, compatible with high-resolution digital audio with sampling rates up to 192kHz. Sooloos is working on an on-line subscriptions service (available January, 2008) that will deliver not only high-res downloads to your server, but allow you to browse and purchase music from a 500,000+ CDquality library through a single buttonpush, using the terrific user interface I’ve described. You can also transfer music between Sooloos and an iPod or similar device using a PC application provided by Sooloos. Sooloos transparently creates both FLAC and MP3 versions of a CD when importing so that you don’t have to keep separate libraries for home and for transferring music to a portable player.

Speaking of importing music, you have several options for getting music into Sooloos. The first, obviously, is to manually load each CD in your collection into Sooloos’ transport. At about eight minutes per disc, importing your music library quickly becomes tedious.

Another option is to send your CDs to Sooloos and they will (for a fee) load your library into the system before they ship it to you. A third option is to specify at the time of purchase a list of CDs you want loaded. Sooloos will buy the discs, import them, and ship the CDs along with the system. Finally, you can purchase blocks of music already loaded on the server, such as a package of essential rock records or the entire output from a specific record label over a specific time frame (all 1960s Prestige titles, for example). Whatever the solution, getting lots of music into the server is paramount— the more music loaded the better the experience and the greater the benefits of Sooloos’ sophisticated search and narrowing features.

In its most basic operation, you turn on the Control component (Store and Source are left powered-up) and your music library appears as album art on the display. The combination of a large display and bright, high-resolution graphics is compelling. You can manually scroll through the covers with back and forth arrows (18 albums per “page”), or jump to a specific artist’s name by touching the letters on an alphabetic display. Touching an album cover brings up a screen showing information about the record, including the tracks. You can select specific tracks to add to the playlist, or add the entire album. You can add as many tracks or albums to the playlist as you like.

The album information page includes tabs for displaying how the album is classified by genre, credits, and something called “mood.” Displayed in a vertical strip on the right side of the screen are thumbnail album covers of other titles by the selected artist, along with ratings of the albums and the year in which each album was released. I liked this last feature; it encourages a more global view of a particular artist’s or band’s work with the ability to quickly jump to any record.

This method of selecting music to play is far more convenient than finding a CD on a shelf, taking it out of the case, and putting it in a CD player. But that’s not Sooloos’ raison d’être. Most of us have music libraries that are far too big to scroll through, and we often approach a listening session not knowing specifically what we want to hear. If that’s the case, you press the Focus icon on the home page to bring up the Focus page. The Focus page allows you to narrow down the range of displayed albums according to several criteria: genre, credits (who plays on the record), label, release date, and “mood”—or any combination of these. For example, I selected Genre from the Focus page which brought up a list of musical styles. From that list I selected Blues, and then from the 65 (!) sub-categories in Blues, chose Texas Blues. The main screen then displayed from the total of 2536 albums in the system just nine titles—five by Stevie Ray Vaughan, two by Clarence Gatemouth Brown, one by Lightnin’ Hopkins, and one by Albert Collins, Robert Cray, and Johnny Copland.

You can Focus in multiple layers if the first Focus is too broad. For example, if you focus on Progressive Rock, you can then narrow down the range of titles by specifying only those albums released in the 1970s. Focus will also winnow your collection by showing you what you’ve played most recently, over a selectable time frame. Focus narrows down your music collection from several thousand titles to a more manageable dozen or so that you’re interested in with just six fingertaps. The entire Texas-blues Focus I just described took just 15 seconds from the time I thought about playing Texas blues to listening to Stevie Ray.

A simpler way to Focus is to touch the button “Focus on Albums Like This” which appears every time you’ve selected an album. If you’re not sure exactly what you want to listen to, but have selected an album, this feature suggests records of a similar style. Another way of finding the music you’re looking for is through Sooloos’ Search feature. You type in the name of an artist, album, or song and the system displays all relevant albums. You can also explore your music collection by musician. I was listening to Steps Ahead’s first domestic album and was struck by Peter Erskine’s terrific drumming. What other albums does he play on? A Search of the library, this time by album credit, turned up five other records featuring Erskine’s drumming. Just those five albums are displayed as cover art until you reset the Focus.