Squeezebox 2

[autopilot]

I want! I want! I want!

So who here has one? What do they think of it? Any tips? Any flaws?

Does it handle gapless playback well?

Tell me all about it please

[Funkstar]

not got one, but been lurking on their mailing lists for a few years (other things just keep coming up preventing me from getting a couple, right now it is a PC or NAS box to run the server on)

Hving said that i believe they are wonderful devices. MP3 playback isn't gappless, but OGG, FLAC and PCM Wav is. FLAC is handled natively in the unit which is a huge benefit over the original SB as you can now fast forward, rewind etc, also reduces the bandwidth required (Was transcoded server side to PCM) along with doubling the buffer time.

I desperately want a couple for the flat

[DsW]

I've had one for a few months now and it is the business.

It really does open up your whole music collection and it has transformed the way we listen to music. We now listen to a lot more of our music rather than just to a few CDs that are lying about.

Big initial effort in ripping all your CDs, tape, MD etc. to hard drive and sorting out the tagging but once that's done you're sorted.

I would strongly recommend ripping with something like EAC (with AccurateRip) to a lossless format (such as FLAC). This will give you the most flexibility later on if you decide to transcode to another format.

Other good thing is being able to stream internet radio (with or without your server PC switched on). Native WMA decoding is coming in the next software/firmware release - due in the next few weeks.

Some people run the server software directly on a NAS so they don't need another PC switched on. I built a seperate, low power living room PC to run the software and have all my music stored on NAS devices. This way I can use the PC for other things like internet browsing on the tv, photo slideshows etc.


For more info check out the SlimDevices forums.

You know you wnat one!

[Funkstar]

a few side notes too.

If you still need to rip all your CD's then have a look at MAREO (http://mareo.monkeydev.org/) allows you to encode several different copies of the same rip. I did FLAC, Ogg and MP3 all at the same time.

if you are interested in a NAS/SlimServer combination then take a look at Infrant (http://www.infrant.com/) they actually support using their boxes as slimservers, as opposed to having to hack it in there. Also their X6 lets you add more capacity dynamically (ish).

Oh yeah, there has also been a price drop on both wired and wireless versions ($20 and £30 respectively) so you might want to hang on till this filters through to the resellers.