Squeezebox - the simplest ideas are often the best

[Paul Adams]

Recently my wife and I got a new car, and being as mechanically inept as I am the only customisation I felt happy with was purchasing a replacement head unit - the one I ended up with was a Sony "Giga Panel" one with 1GB of memory built into the face-plate, which plays MP3s (this was a must).

We embarked then upon the consolidation of my previously sampled CDs and her project to go through her CD collection and go sample-crazy - ending up with a single repository of all our MP3s on the file server.
This was a healthy exercise which led to the deletion of tracks which came from albums purchased for single songs (it's rather sad how often we have both done this), and the standardisation of sampling rates and normalisation.

Now we could not only load the head unit for the car with ~250 tracks we both enjoy, but could also stream straight over the network from any computer.
Nifty.

But then came the question of how to play MP3s in the living room, and I recalled hearing some talk of a "Squeezebox" (on this very forum, I think) which sounded just like the ticket.


Well colour me impressed - ordered it Wednesday afternoon and it turned up on Friday morning, it took no effort to connect to my WPA-protected wireless network and coxially hook up to my Marantz SR8500 amp, installed the song-serving software on my server and within minutes the speakers were merrily playing away.

The interface and design of the connectors are as simple as they need to be whilst giving access to all the necessary features.
A product that does exactly what it says it does, and it just as easy to set up.


Now comes the tricky part - fixing up all the ID3 tags to make sure the "genre" is correct so we can play random tracks to suit our mood (typically metal/rock) - it's strange how some people have categorised songs as completely the wrong genre (Michael Jackson "Off The Wall" != Rock).

[autopilot]

Yep, i love my Squeezebox 3. Been using it everyday for months on end. It's one of the best things i have ever bought in my entire life. Everyone i have every shown, techie or not, as wanted to buy one. It's so rare a product hits the nail on the head so well.

Just a shame that Rapsody does not work in the UK.

[Funkstar]

Even my mum would quite like one

It didn't take much to get her interested, i just logged onto SqueezeNetwork and found a Country radio station broadcasting from middle America

Once they get their back garden sorted out and new summer house built, i'm going to set one up and rip all their CDs so they can sit out in the garden listening to music.

[autopilot]

I did'nt think it would take long for Funkstar to show up in this thread

[Funkstar]

:shrug:

i traul the New Posts seach ever time i log on. so shoot me

anyway, i lurves my squeezebox

[johnny02004976]

sorry for sounded like a noob - but what do Squeezboxes do??

[Funkstar]

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?BeginnersGuide

Basically SlimServer sits on a PC and serves music to a SqueezeBox over your wired or wirless network. This is much more than just an audio sender as the backend can do some very cool things. Using lossless audio files (FLAC, WMALossless, WAV and ALAC) the sound quality is extremely high, enough to rival CD players costing 10x as much.

There are so many other features i could witter on about, but i don't have time right now

[johnny02004976]

these sound awesome, im gonna get looking for one......i can see me getting slapped back by a huge pricetag

EDIT: maybe not, £160 seems very reasonable

[autopilot]

Originally Posted by Funkstar

:shrug:

i traul the New Posts seach ever time i log on. so shoot me

anyway, i lurves my squeezebox

I was just saying that because i knew what a massive SB fan you are mate.

[Funkstar]

that was meant to be a bit sarcastic and flippant Dom. Obviously i failed misserably to convey that

(damned tinterweb forumy-bobs)

[Alex]

So what can a squeezebox do that an XBox 360 can't? Other than that the 360 needs a screen I guess...

[Mutley]

Nothing. Get an Xbox360. Much more audiophile. I got a squeezebox 3. its crap really.

Hang on, what am I saying??

SB3 (plus Slimserver and squeezenetwork of course) is fantastic. I've had mine for a few days now. Stream all my music as FLAC (lossless compression), and never has my moderately OK hi fi sounded so good. And its so simple to use. I've been talking to my wife for months for ages about getting one, mostly getting rolled-eye responses, until finally I wore her down. Now its installed, even she thinks its really cool and so simple to use.

Its very easy to get installed and set up. The hard bit is ripping your music, and tagging it!

[Mutley]

Forgot to say, if you are happy with what an xbox can do for you, for streaming music to your hi fi, thats cool.
An SB3 just does streaming very well, and the unit is eligant - think minimal Apple-approach-to-design. The DAC in the unit is very high quality, so you get high quality sound piped to your hi fi (digital or analogue). It also supports both wired and wireless interfaces for streaming music from your media server (I just use my normal PC).

I could go on and on with what it can do - best check the web site (http://www.slimdevices.com). Its not without its flaws (mostly in the server software, but thats under constant development, and is open source as well), but few things are.

[autopilot]

Originally Posted by Mutley

Its not without its flaws (mostly in the server software, but thats under constant development, and is open source as well), but few things are.

You can say that again, Slimserver is geting worse IMO. Personally i think they are heading towards Sony territory at the moment. Everyone keeps saying that 6.5 will fix it all, but every beta i have tried has had serious problems and they are calling it an alpha ffs. Talk like that will get you flamed to death on the offical forums though.

I am getting very very frustrated, but all that said it's still the best thing in its class and i absolutly LOVE IT

[Mutley]

I've had one dabble with 6.5 a little while ago, and decided not to bother after that.
Been on 6.22 for a while, then moved to 6.3.1. I had some problems with MIP, but figured out what the issues were and its been fine since. I shall stay there until I see what 6.5 can really do for me...

[BenW]

So whats ethernet sound quality like compared to wireless sound quality?