Rating: 
Summary: Almost A Star
Review: The new Linksys Media Adapter could be a fantastic device. It's easy to set-up and being able to pump my MP3's through my stereo without having to use my laptop is a dream come through. I said could be because the software that comes with the Media Adapter is hideous. The most elementary of free media packages are a 100 times better. The software doesn't allow you to view or play MP3's by Album. Instead you get to choose by artist, song or genre. Excuse me but cross colloboration by various artists makes it impossible to listen to an entire album. You only get to listen to the songs on a album that were performed soley by the artist. How about listening to one song while choosing another? Forget about it. Choosing a new song before the other has stopped playing means you jump to the new song. What happened to listening to songs like I did with my ancient history 45's? Want to listen to a playlist? Fine but don't hope to create one on the fly. Can't do it. I can go on about chopped titles and names but I won't. The product is a wonderful idea that went astray with the software people. Please LinkSys, release new software!
Rating: 
Summary: Waiting For Host
Review: The Linksys Support was not very helpful but you have to realize this is a very new product. I use the wired connction not wireless. I had the problem of waiting for host. By the process of elimination I found I cannot use Mcafee Privacy with the WMA 11B. Once I uninstalled Privacy everything works fine. I recommend if you continually see 'Wainting For Host' you find what program is loaded into memory and remove it. I did and everything works.
Rating:
Summary: Great idea, software needs work
Review: This is an excellent idea at a great price. $$$$ for a wireless MP3 player unlocking all the stuff stored on my server is excellent value. Got the unit to boot and register (even on wireless after remembering to edit the MAC filter table - by the way, am I the only one who thinks it's weird to show the WEP key in cleartext on the TV setup, even after you saved the info?) but both the user interface and server side application need work in my opinion. First the user interface: With an iPod I need all of 5 keys and a scrollweel to control everything MP3. With this remote there are 13 relevant keys. I find myself pressing back when I mean previous and right arrow when I mean page down. Will probably get used to it, but this looks like user interface design by techies. Then the PC app. It's probably my files, but the media manager chokes on them, leaving a half-built database. Whenever something goes awry, the databse shows double, triple or wrong entries, and there is no way to solve it than un- and reinstall. Can't see why a file was not added, can't edit the databse manually. This behaviour is seriously worrying, looks like the app needs some more testing. As for JPG file browsing I can't fault the unit. Be aware though it looks like it creates thumbnails for all your pictures. If you have a large number of them, the "cache" folder has a lot of entries and takes up a considerable amount of space on your C drive (no way to tell the install to put stuff like this somewhere else). All in all a great product, especially if it reads your MP3 collection without problems, but it needs some software updates before I'll recommend it to others.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Device -- Poor Support
Review: I have the media adaptor wired to my Sony amp/rcv and wireless connected to the laptop. It works great and does everything I expected it to. The pictures are good quality and the music fine as well. The onscreen menus are okay and fairly intuitive. The setup menu is horrible and is NOT intuitive. Did I have to use the setup menu? Oh yeah. What should have been an easy setup turned out to be about 3 hrs of poring through documentation and XP. I spent over an hour with support on the phone. They have no clue and finally told me to send it back. At that point I became more determined than ever to make it work myself. At 2 am I made a change under the networking configuration of XP "to allow connections from other users" or something like that. Bingo! Up and running. Like I said it should have been easy, I had XP pro running on all my networked computers and the 802.11b wireless running flawlessly. It may be something I had inadvertantly changed, but the support line should have been more knowledeable. Alls well that ends well.
Rating: 
Summary: Installation Nightmares
Review: Where do I begin? I purchased the WMA11B over 2 weeks ago and I still can't get it to work. Like the other review, I, too, cannot get past the "Waiting For Host" message. I tried calling the Linksys tech support department and it seems as though I knew more about this product. To resolve my problem they fed me the usual b.s. like uninstall the application and then reinstall it, make sure you reboot after installing the application, power-off the adapter and then try it again. My dog knows more than these so-called experts. If anybody knows how to resolve the infamous "Waiting For Host" message, please let us all know by posting another review here.
Rating:
Summary: Don't buy it
Review: Customer support is non existent by phone. Linksys intructions lack many important details. Very sorry to see Linksys have such a poor roll-out for a product.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: I just picked it up tonight. Installed in about 10 minutes, over the wireless network itself. Sound/Video quality is excellent. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Here's hoping that a future firmware update will allow for playback of video files!
Rating:
Summary: Works very well - a few limitations
Review: Generally, the linksys WMA11B media adapter works very well. The installation is a little non-intuitive (as mentioned on other reviews). Even if you plan on using it in wireless mode, you might want to configure it while in wired (not wireless) mode. With the default settings out of the box I never could get the setup software to completely detect the adapter in wireless mode (it would claim to find it, but would then not list it for configuration). When I direct wired the adapter to my router it found the adapter and permitted configuration. Oddly enough, you can have the adapter in wired mode but configure it for wireless. In fact this was the only way I could get it to work. I didn't pay close enough attention during the wireless configuration section and kept the default setting of "Ad-hoc" for network "Mode" rather than "Infrastructure". Infrastructure applies if the adapter will connect to a router rather than to a computer. Since I did not set this configuration correctly, when I connected the adapter to my TV and powered it up the configured adapter never found my wireless network. The TV just displayed "Waiting for host" with 92% signal strength. Once I figured out my mistake I re-ran the setup program (with the adapter direct wired)and changed the wireless mode to infrastructure. Problem solved. Even works with full 128 bit WEP and MAC address filtering on my router. You can change the WEP key (and a host of other settings) from the remote using the "setup" menu over the TV. My only complaint to date is the playlist support. It supports m3u and asx formats. It would be nice if it natively supported Windows Media Player. You can export a playlist from Windows Media Player into m3u format, but its an extra step and a hassle. Performance wise, the pictures were clear and the sound was great with my 192 bit-rate mp3s. I could push the host computer hard on other tasks while the adapter was running a slideshow of over 2000 pictures and playing from a 253 song playlist. No hiccups at all. Improvements should include clearer wireless mode installations and better playlist support. The host software requires XP and it installed some .NET components. I was surprised to see these components sucking up > 120MB of RAM. Better memory management would help. Overall I am pleased with the product.
Rating: 
Summary: Buyer Beware
Review: Watch out for Linksys... I had a tech support question for them regarding this product, and they have seemingly outsourced all their support overseas. The reps were totally unhelpful, and were obviously just reading from scripts. I managed to get the problem resolved myself, and the product does work as planned, but I would suggest spending the extra bucks and getting a Turtle Beach Audiotron instead. I wish I had.
Rating:
Summary: Big hassle to get it woking
Review: The other reviews discuss the installation difficulties. So far, I totally agree. The manual is next to useless - it is on a PDF file, but doesn't have any meaningfull troubleshooting guide. The "quick start guide" is just plain wrong. To see the device at all from the PC, you need to turn off the Windows firewall. You then need to hook up with a wired connection to configure it for wireless. However even then the device did not see the PC to play music or pictures - "waiting for host" is the message - after several reboots and power cycles I was finally able to get it to work with a wired connection. For wireless I upgraded the router firmware, set the media adapter to "infrastructor", disabled WAP encryption. Eventually I got a connection. I was then able to reenable WAP. I called tech support, they responded after about 1/2 hour and were no help their suggestion was that the box was broken and to return it! It was clear that he had no training on the product. I asked them to escalate the problem, and a guy with real experience called me back within 1/2 hour and he talked me through the wired set up. He still owes a call back on wireless (although I may be ahead of him) There is no help on the linksys web site for this product. The product performance is good now that it is working, although after it had been playing for a hour or so, it dropped the connection and needed to be power cycled, I also noticed a couple of gaps of about 20 seconds or so in the music - if that is common then it will be a pain. Linksys do need to ship some software (or at least make recommendations) to manage playlists. RealAudio play lists don't work, Windows media player play lists need to be exported, MusicMatch's seem to work - but you need to search hard to find them. It would be much better to be able create playlists from the TV interface. This is much to geeky - OK for a geek like me, but I can't see my wife using it. My advice is to wait.
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