Slashdot Mirror
Review of Squeezebox MP3 Player
The Squeezebox has no local storage. It is entirely reliant upon some other PC in your house to store your data. Now I have used a great many devices with internal storage, and external storage, and what it comes down to is that this is the best of breed for streaming devices. You install a tiny server application, and go. The server app itself is written in perl, and has been ported to Linux, Windows, and OS X. For this review I tested by running the server on an iMac so I could try out the iTunes integration.
The server installed in seconds. The only real setting required of me was to choose the source of my music in a freshly installed prefPane. You can choose either iTunes, or an arbitrary directory. Setting up the Squeezebox was just as easy. Plug it in, turn it on, and answer a few questions. In my case, the only question I had to enter was the password key for my wireless network: DHCP takes care of the networking, and the client detected the server running on my iMac through Rendezvous without any action on my part.
The unit itself is incredibly minimal. Of course there is a power jack. Next, your input options are a standard network jack, and an antenna for 802.11b wireless networking. And finally for output, you can choose between a standard set of RCA analog outputs, an optical digital port, and a coaxial digital port. You plug the thing into your stereo, and you're ready to go.
So after barely a minute, I'm ready to listen to music. First, you can use the included remote control to choose artists, albums, or playlists. You can play. Shuffle. Skip. All the usual things that you want from your remote. But that's only scratching the surface of the power behind this device.
The Squeezebox makes use of the new 5.0 version of the fabulous SlimServer. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that this is the best web interface available for playing MP3s... and as a little secret, the player will work with any shoutcast capable client. I used an earlier version in my house to stream to laptops before daapd and iTunes 4 made that unnecessary. But I still use it to stream occasionally if I want 2 locations to be playing the same music.
The web interface provides you with an extensive roster of tools for manipulating playlists, viewing cover art (available from thumbnails, or from ID3 tags). The web interface makes dealing with larger MP3 collections quite simple. And since it announces itself via Rendezvous, you don't even need to remember the IP of the device. As if that isn't enough, the interface is tremendously flexible: almost everything can be changed, from the contents of the menu, to the skin of the HTML.
As if thats not enough, the device is capable of playing AACs (not the encrypted variety tho!) or OGGs if that happens to be your format of choice. Things will sound about as good as can be expected for MP3s. If you have a decent stereo and use one of the digital outputs, you wiil really want to start ripping your tracks at much higher bit rates.
The Squeezebox has done great things to integrate with iTunes, but it could go a few steps further. The only major thing lacking from the interface is the concept of track rating, and I would love to see that available to me at least from the web interface, and possibly let me use the remote to add or remove stars- I think this is the only really substantial thing lacking from this system. Besides the rating system, it would be great if iTunes & the Slim Server shared values for things like when I last played a track, or the total number of times I've played a given track. Then my numbers would add up no matter where in the house I was listening to my music. Lastly, it would be nice if the playlists in iTunes and Slim Server were truly shared. As it stands, iTunes playlists are read only to Slim, and Slim playlists are non existent to iTunes. I'd love to have a single unified interface for tracking my playlists.
It's also worth noting that the Slimdevices folks continue to develop their web interface. There are frequent updates, and they are constantly adding new features. And of course, since the whole thing is perl, I guess I could hack all of this in myself if I wasn't such a lazy bum.
Now it's time for me to cover the one and only downside to this great little device: The cost. Yes, we're talking $300... and you still need an external machine to host the actual songs. But you are not limited by disk space that way. And with the 802.11b, you can plug this in anywhere in your home... even those pesky rooms that didn't come with cat-5 already wired in. So yeah, it's a bit steep of a price to pay, but this device is really your best bet for getting your large MP3 collection to any location in the house you desire. The elegant web interface, the amazing customizability, the simplicity of installation, and the flexibility of server applications really make this a no brainer.
Anyone who is a frequent reader of these pages knows of my obsession
I'm sure they're both aware, yes.
anyhow.. 802.11b MP3 players? Very cool, however the product page doesn't mention encryption, does this leave the product open to lawsuits by RIAA for transmitting the music where a neighbour could potentially snag it?
Trolling is a art,
said any advantage this mp3 player has over other ones, would there really be any point in upgrading from my current mp3 player? It would be nice if you could discuss those points.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
As cool as this device is, I think I'm going to let the market for devices like this take a little more form before I start buying anything.
Yes, I know what the song really means; that's why I posted AC
... if you haven't already got fibre routed throughout your dwelling, you're no geek in *my* eyes! :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
It's $299. You could buy an xbox and mod it for the same functionality for under 200 nowadays. Anyone ever here of xbox media player/center? Store music on your xbox or stream from your computer in a variety of ways. You could even splurge for an xbox 802.11b adapter if ya want.
I had been considering a slimp3 player since they first came out. I convinced myself I didn't need one, and I could wait until they integrated wireless and a digital optical out.
In the mean time, I purchased an audrey from ebay and set that up. The audrey is on the network, and offers touch-screen browsing of music and playlists right at the machine, instead of having to build your playlists on a computer through a web browser.
Man, tough choice though, they're both seriously cool.
idiot - this isnt about handheld players
The iPod is a completely different beast. This review is talking about a standalone player that is permanently hooked into your stereo, useful for people who don't want to find their ipod and plug it in every time they want to use it with the stereo, or want to listen to shoutcast in the living room
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
I have a Rio MP3 Receiver which I bought for $55 USD. The out-of-the-box software isn't that great, but that's easily changeable with anyone of a number of different projects. It also has a network jack (no wifi, but so what...you can just plug it into an access point for a total cost of far less than $300), plus Home PNA, and it also sounds great.
So what makes this thing worth all that extra money ?
And what do people here think about wireless multimedia devices anyways ? I've had enough problems trying to get my laptop to even talk to my wireless router through a few walls when they're less than 100 ft away... it seems to me that trying to stream multimedia over the same sort of link isn't going to be that reliable if you have a larger home and/or less than ideal geometry. It's exactly this concern that prompted me to spend the money to retrofit my house with CAT6 throughout.
Symphony no. 9 in D Minor.
;)
I guess, to avoid ALL possible snarling from the RIAA, they made it be playing something nobody could ever find on Kazaa.
This device is not intended to replace an iPod. It is intended to be a permanent part of a home entertainment system. iPods typically don't come with a remote for instance and do go missing when your wife goes out. The only thing it has in common with the iPod is that it plays compressed music. Don't get me wrong, iPods are cool but are not the first idea that is going to occur to me if I want to add a music player to my entertainment system.
I like the idea of a finished, small, and featureful device that uses the music already on your computer on your big stereo. The problem is that this thing costs waaaaay to much. I'd pay a hundred for it, a hundred 125 tops.
Does Squeezebox support Ogg Vorbis?
If you have both LAME and the oggtools installed, SlimServer will automatically convert Ogg files to raw PCM on the fly for playback.
I mean.. this isn't ideal, but it will play them.. so who cares? In some ways, this is even cooler, as it allows you to play anything can be changed into a PCM stream (some hacking may be requird, but if they already have it set up to do one, I can't see it being that hard to have it do others)..
I think it's cool. And to everyone who says it's too expensive, you need to get a real job. I'm sick of all these high school and college kids saying "ooh, it's too expensive.. why would you spend $400 on a video card?" BECAUSE I CAN. Just like I can spend $300 on a streaming music player. I'm not rich, but I make a good living as a software developer and can afford cool toys. I wouldn't want them to dumb this down to make it $150. I want a $300 player with a sweet interface and a nice remote control.
I own the previous model (slimp3) and I have to say that it is the best purchase I have made in quite a few years. It cost a pretty penny getting it up into Canada but it was worth it.
I now have access to every CD I have ever owned (ripped at 320kbs) at the push of a button. This reality has literally changed my life. I now watch less tv because getting my slimp3 up and running is easier then turning the tv on and hunting for something to watch.
No, the squeeze box isn't portable but that's not what it was designed for; just as the iPod wasn't designed for stereo integration. The SqueezeBox gives you audiophile quality sound, infinite expansion capabilities, ease of operation, no moving parts, a high quality display, and an open source server that will never leave you high and dry. No other product on the market has this level of flexibilty, adaptability and openness.
P.S. I urge everyone to think about the non-obvious benefits of instant music access. In these trying times music can offer an unexpected shelter from stress and frustration.
I had been worried that it would be too painful to find music from as large a collection as mine using only the remote control's numeric keypad, and that I'd end up having to use the Web interface to control playlists, which is less convenient. However, the browsing and searching functionality built into the Squeezebox worked much better than I'd expected. Browsing by artist is quick - you zoom down to the right section of the alphabet with a few keypresses on the remote's numeric pad (e.g., press "7" once for P, twice for Q, and so on), then use the up/down buttons to scroll to the right artist. You can then browse the list of albums or tracks. You can also do a search for keywords in the title.
One feature that surprised me, but that I quite like having seen it, is that the indexing software ignores prepositions in artist names. So the list of artists starting with "S" went something like "Sarah McLachlan", "The Seekers", "Severe Tire Damage", ..., "Sting", "The Strawbs", "Sunday's Well". It also handled accented characters without a glitch: "äaut" was treated the same as "a" in terms of sorting and searching. Neither of these features is really appropriate outside the English-speaking world (in Swedish, "äaut" shouldn't sort with "a", but at the end of the alphabet), but they work great for me. (Yes, those should be real a-with-umlaut characters but Slashcode seems to strip them out if I enter them properly. Sigh.)
The display is bright and easy to read, and if you're too far away, one button press on the remote switches it to double-size characters, which can be read from across the room.
$300 is a little expensive for a toy like this, but it's going to make a huge difference to the way that we listen to music at home. We'd already got a dedicated 24/7 home file server holding the music collection, and the Squeezebox is the perfect complement to that. We're already discussing whether to get a second one for another room.
would think that it would be possible to add more data sharing between iTunes and the SlimServer app. Most of the iTunes data is stored in an XML file in \My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music Library.xml. The SlimServer is open source, so if you reallywanted that feature you might be able to hack it in yourself.
What are you talking about? We already do this!
All your itunes music and playlists automagically appear on Squeezebox. Rip a new CD, boom it's there. We pick up changes in the iTunes XML database automatically.
That's a reason not to buy encrypted AACs, not a reason not to buy this thingie. Do you really want DRM on the squeezebox?
sulli
RTFJ.
Squeezebox. Maybe it's been optimized to play accordion music.
The key difference between devices like this one and the Audiotron is that they rely on having the mp3's stored in another location. This means that you never run out of capacity (when you do, you jsut upgrade the hard drive in your PC).
As the previous poster said, this is a home audio device, not a portable player, so it's a different approach and a different feature set. Better in absolute terms? I dunno, maybe. Better for the home-audio environment it was designed for? Almost certainly.
I think Slim Devices has a wonderful gadget here, but the price is on the high side of outrageous. You can buy a gigantic Sony 400 *DVD* changer for $400 standard retail, and it'll even support MP3 encoded CR-R discs and Super Audio CD's. Yeah, it's nice to be able to stream audio straight from your PC, but if you want to store uncompressed or losslessly compressed audio, that's going to take a lot of storage space if you have a 400 disc collection. I've ripped pretty much every disc I own to my hard drives, mostly uncompressed, and it consumes well in excess of 250 gigabytes. Factor the cost of that kind of storage into the equation, and getting a proper Squeezebox configuration going (including a wireless router) could add up to well over $500.
I went with cd3o's $200 wireless media receiver a few months ago, and I've been pretty happy with my decision. Does most of what the Squeezebox does plus a few things that it doesn't do and costs $100 less. It's also a Linux device like the Squeezebox, although their server software isn't currently available for Linux (though others have apparently written a Linux server for it - check their support forums).
I think these gadgets are certainly the wave of the future, though I suspect we'll see their functions rolled into standard receivers / preamps at some point.
The addition of digital outputs makes this (at last) a reasonable competitor to the AudioTron.
Because they are trying to keep the price down, both SlimDevices and Turtle Beach used cheap DACs for the D->A conversion. Thus, the analog sound coming from them was pretty bad -- OK for background music but no better. And I'm no audiophile...this quality problem has been oticeable to lots of people.
The AudioTron has always had a digital out, whereas SLiMP3 did not. That means one could use the nice, high-quality DACs in a medium or high end receiver/amp, and get decent sound. That's why I bought two AudioTrons rather than these.
Now, I would probably get these instead. Ignoring the fact that Turtle Beach is due for a new device soon, we have the following differences:
AudioTron:
+ No server software, works with NAS devices
+ Typical audio component form factor
+ HPNA for those without any kind of LAN
Squeezebox
+ Additional flexibility in Perl server
+ Better web interface, integration
+ Both kinds of digital output
+ 802.11b free instead of $50 add-on