The Creative Sond Blaster Wireless Music (sbwm) is a tiny little box that connects to your WLAN (802.11b), receives music data from your computer and sends this via an optical digital out or traditional anlog rca outputs to your home stereo. What makes the sbwm special is the remote that uses rf technology, that means you don't have to point with the remote in any certain direction to get your commands transferred. What makes this even better is the fact, that the remote has a LCD display included which shows all the information you need to select the songs.

In comparison to the SliMP3 and audiotron this is a major breakthrough, as you no longer have to stare to a display on a device beeing a couple of meters away from you. So this baby was something I must have. As you can't buy them in Europe, I imported one myself. Bringing the unit to work in 220 volt countries is easy. I replaced the external 6V AC power supply (rated 1.5A) by a 7.5V DC power supply from Conrad Elektronik that comes along with a suitable connector plug (part number 511319). Watch out for correct polarity when you connect the sbwm to the power supply. If you do it wrong the unit will not power up correctly (remains in standby).If you are interested in my home media network in total, have a look here.   

1. The Good

In general I am very impressed by the sbwm because of the phantastic remote control concept and because the unit really works quite flawlessly with the latest firmware and software updates from Creative. Taking the price of about $170 into account this package is hard to beat. That the sbwm can handle archives of more than 30.000 titles without a problem was a positive surprise to me, as for expample the audiotron has trouble to handle archives of this size. What I don't like is the "windows only" approach. I have a linux server running 24/7, therefore, it would be much more convinient to have the server software located there. May be someone will develop a linux based server software for this unit in the future, like this happended to the good old Rio Receiver, where suddenly an open source java server application became reality (JReceiver).

2. The Bad

Unfortunately, there still is a bug in the software that prevents you from playing songs that have special characters in the artist name. The funny thing is, that special characters aren't a problem in album or track names, just artist names are troubled by this bug. Maybe this isn't a big deal for users in the US and UK, but a lot of artists from mainland Europe do have characters like ä,ö, ü, Ü, Ö, Ä, ß, é, è, á, à, â, etc in their names.Purging these special characters from the artist ID2 tags of my mp3 collection is not an option to me, as I have other network players (audiotron, slimp3) that handle this without a problem and I am not willing to cut down my tags just because of a software bug in the sbwm.

3. Having a deeper look at the SBWM

Well the best solution to this problem would be to have Creative to fix the bug. As they don't sell the units in Europe and their support in general doesn't look to be too good (no customer forum, for example) I don't expect them to be quick on this. As I don't like the solutions "not to hear artists with special characters in their name" and "purge all special characters from the ID3 tags of the mp3 files" the only solution for the moment is, to eliminate the special characters from the sbwm internal database, that stores all the housekeeping information about the music archive.

3.1 Creatives SBWM Software Bundle

To drive the sbwm hardware Creative gives you a bundle of software that consists of to the following main components. When you have a closer look at the components Creative delivers in detail, you'll find the following.

Server Process (SBWMsvr.exe):
This one keeps controll of the client and does send music data as well as information about the music (artists, album, track, etc) to the client box. The housekeeping information about what music data is stored where on your computer is realized by a MS Jet DB.

Server Console (SBWMcon.exe):
This one allows some basic interaction with the client. You can

• select tracks from your archive to the actual playqueue and optionally save this as a playlist
• control (play, pause, atop, etc.) your client
• manage the so called "smart playlists" (playlists that dynamically include certain tracks according to customer defined conditions)
• determine a number of settings
  

Media Source Organizer (CTCMS.exe):
This is the central component to manage your music archive. Technically speaking this is Creative's administration interface for the MS Jet DB. Here you can do things like

• change names of artists, albums, tracks, etc.
• delete tracks
• search for music in the archive
• play music from the archive on the pc this application runs on
• management of defined playlists
• and last not least: import of tracks and playlists stored on your computer

Creative Import Wizzard (CTImport.exe):
This allows you to specify Files on your computer that should become part of your music archive by storing their housekeeping information into the centralized MS Jet DB.

Creative Playlist Import Wizard (CTEPLImp.exe):
Here you can import playlists to the music archive.

MS Jet Database (PCML_1.dpm):
The components mentioned above make use of a MS Jet DB that acts as a centralized music archive. As MS Access can handle this type of database you can directly look into it, if you know the password of your database. A search on the creative support forum might be a great idea to go on...

3.2 Replacing Special Characters

In The DatabaseIf you own Microsoft Access (Version 2000 or later will do) you can open the database, and simply use the "search and replace" functionality of Access to change the artist names of the tracks. If you don't like to do this replacement job maually you can define a VB funktion that can be used in an "update query" to convert all special characters in the artist names. A VB function that does the trick looks like this:

Public Function Umlaut(S)
Dim I As Integer, Ch As String * 1, Ch1 As String * 1, IsUpCase As Boolean, Res As StringIf IsNull(S) Then Umlaut = Null: Exit Function
Res = ""For I = 1 To Len(S)
Ch = Mid(S, I, 1)Ch1 = IIf(I < Len(S), Mid(S, I + 1, 1), " ") < br > IsUpCase = (Asc(Ch1) = Asc(UCase(Ch1)))
Select Case Asc(Ch)Case Asc("Ä"): Res = Res & IIf(IsUpCase, "AE", "Ae")
Case Asc("Ö"): Res = Res & IIf(IsUpCase, "OE", "Oe")Case Asc("Ü"): Res = Res & IIf(IsUpCase, "UE", "Ue")Case Asc("ä"): Res = Res & "ae"
Case Asc("ö"): Res = Res & "oe"
Case Asc("ü"): Res = Res & "ue"
Case Asc("ß"): Res = Res & "ss"
Case Asc("é"): Res = Res & "e"
Case Asc("è"): Res = Res & "e"
Case Asc("É"): Res = Res & "E"
Case Asc("È"): Res = Res & "E"
Case Asc("â"): Res = Res & "a"
Case Asc("Â"): Res = Res & "A"
Case Asc("á"): Res = Res & "a"
Case Asc("à"): Res = Res & "a"
Case Asc("Á"): Res = Res & "A"
Case Asc("À"): Res = Res & "A"
Case Asc("´"): Res = Res & "'"
Case Asc("`"): Res = Res & "'"
Case Else: Res = Res & Ch
End Select
Next I
Umlaut = Res
End Function

I am not going to explain how to define and compile VB functions in Access and how to define and use an "update query" that converts the whole stuff automatically. The Access documentation gives sufficient help on this, as I did master it although knowing nothing about Access before.

The usual steps to get the special characters out of the database are:

   1. import all tracks with CTImport.exe
   2. import all playlists with CTEPLImp.exe
   3. start MS Access on PCML_1.mdb
   4. convert all special characters in to their "non special" equivalents
   5. leave MS Access

Now have a look at your rf remote and see that the special characters have all gone from the artist names and that you can play the formerly invisible tracks of these artists.