Vortexbox Distributor for Australia
Vortexbox (Australia) is the authorised distributor of the Vortexbox appliance for Australia & New Zealand.
As well as supplying the Vortexbox, we also cover the warranty for all Vortexbox appliances supplied by us. They are built for Australia & all parts come from Australian distributors.
The official announcement was made on the US web site today, see it here.
17 Feb 10 Specifications Upgrade
The single core Atom 230 processor is no longer available in Australia & neither is the dual core 330. The 330 has been replaced by the dual core D510 & it comes with a new motherboard that features 2 RAM slots, (up from 1) & gigabit ethernet.
Unfortunately this means a price rise, but the the new price is the same as buying our original Vortexbox with the upgrade to the dual core processor.
For further details, please visit the Buy page & the Specifications page.
Tags: Vortexbox Specifications
17 Feb 10 Playing other music formats
You need plug-ins to support other type of music on VortexBox player. This is how to get WMA, Napster, some BBC stations, etc working.
First if you haven’t done so already install mplayer from command line
setup-mplayer
next in the SqueezeBox Server GUI go to settings -> plugins. Go to the bottom and add this URL to Additional Repositories.
http://bpaplugins.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/repo.xml
Now install the WMA plugin or whatever you need.
Note: You may need a unique mac address assigned to your player for some services. If you leave the mac address blank when you create your VortexBox Player in the GUI VortexBox will assign you a random one.
Tags: new software
03 Feb 10 Overhauled website
We, (Vortexbox Australia), have overhauled our web site. We’re now running on Wordpress.
We’ve had a few hassles getting it up & running, we apologise for any inconvenience that may have been caused by this.
We will be releasing some extra upgrades soon due to request from current & end users, so check back regularly. If there are some options you’d like to see, please contact us via the contact page & let us know.
03 Feb 10 Vortexbox 1.1 software released
We are very excited about this release of VortexBox. We are moving from being just a media server to a music player as well. This version of VortexBox includes VortexBox Player. You can use your internal sound card or external USB DAC to play your music. VortexBox Player supports music recorded at up to 24-bit/192kHz. This is higher then most players support including the Sonos and SqueezeBox line of hardware players.
We have also added a lot of other great features requested by the VortexBox, SqueezeBox, and Sonos communities. Here is a list of the new features.
- VortexBox Player as the default software player.
- Cover are added to all mp3 files for easy use in iTunes and XBMC.
- Option to have mp3 or AAC mirror updated after ripping.
If you have a recent version of VortexBox you can update using the GUI software updater. If you have an older version without the GUI updated use
yum update
from command line.
If you are upgrading from an older version you will need to run
setup-vb-player
from command line to get VortexBox Player working.
Tags: new software, Vortexbox 1.1
12 Jan 10 Vortexbox 1.0 released
21 Dec 09 VortexBox 1.0 released
After several months of hard work we have released VortexBox 1.0. It has many of the features requested by the community including
* FLAC to Apple Lossless (m4a) mirroring through the web GUI
* MusicBrainz and CDDB used for ID3 tags
* Tool tips for each section in the GUI
* Logitech SqueezeCenter 7.4.1 pre installed and configured
* Software upgrade through the web GUI
1.0 also has a lot of bug fixes including better handling of existing cover art. You can update to this version using this from the command line.
yum update
If you have squeezecenter you will need to do this first. http://vortexbox.org/2009/10/squeezebox-server-on-vortexbox/
if you have a version before 0.7 you will need to do this or reload from the ISO.
http://vortexbox.org/2009/06/vortexbox-06-to-07-upgrades/
15 Dec 2009 New Product
Vortexbox Australia is proud to announce a new version of the Vortexbox appliance, the Vortexbox RAID 1. This is identical to the normal Vortexbox except that it has a pair of hard drives configured in RAID 1, (also known as mirrored hard drives) & a different case, (so that we could fit the extra hard drive in).
This technology is commonly used in servers for data redundancy, as if 1 hard drives fails, they can keep on operating as the 2nd hard drive is an exact duplicate of the 1st hard drive. Dimensions of the case are 20 cm X 33.5 cm X 26.9 cm. For further details including pricing, please visit the Buy page or click here.
21 Oct 09 FLAC to CD
Ever wanted to get your FLACs back on a CD to play in your car CD player?
Now you can. The latest update to VortexBox now has a script called flac2cd.sh. From command line cd to the folder with your FLACs. Insert a blank CD and type flac2cd.sh.
The disk will eject in a few minutes and you can play it in your CD player!
24 Sep 09 VortexBox NAS with Twonky Media server
Some VortexBox users have requested easy installation of Twonky Media server. For those of you who don’t know Twonky Media server is a $30 UPnP server. This allows you to stream music and video to any UPnP compliant device. Although VortexBox already has a free UPnP server installed the free server doesn’t work that well with some devices.
So if you want to stream your media to your xbox 360 or other UPnP device this in the add-on for you. To install Twonky Media server type this from command line;
yum clean all
yum update
yum install twonkymedia
One Twonky Media server is installed you will need to buy a $30 license from http://www.twonkymedia.com/ you can enter the license code through the web GUI.
