Freecom may not be the household name for music streamers, but the Dutch manufacturer has come out with an attractive £100 solution for the home. The MusicPal can pull MP3s and WAV files from a PC (or a Mac) over your home network, and can suck Net radio down your connection too.
The company is working on an update that adds support for WMA files. There's a built-in speaker, composite and line-out and support for WEP and WPA Wi-Fi security. Interestingly there's also some love shown for RSS feeds, such as those used to distribute podcasts. M3U playlist files are also compatible, so building a fat list of your favourite tunes for remote access isn't out of the question.
MusicPal could be a great alternative to some of the more costly music streamers on the market. Products such as Sony's Giga Juke 50HDE may be beautiful pieces of kit, but £500 is a hell of a price if all you want is streaming audio. What the MusicPal won't do is give you access to on-demand albums, unlike the (exorbitantly expensive) new Sonos setup we checked out last week.
The MusicPal goes on sale in the UK soon and should retail for £99.99. Look out for our full review, which'll be up lickety-split. -Nate Lanxon
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