Review of the Squeezebox

Slim Devices recently sent us the latest version of their Squeezebox MP3 player. It was snatched up and reviewed by Patrick Schoonveld (the poor guy responsible for making ads work on Slashdot and other OSTG sites). His review of the thing follows.

The following review was written by Patrick Schoonveld

A few weeks back, I noticed a shiny and lonely piece of kit hanging around the Slashdot offices. Ever the inquisitive [nosey] individual, I asked and was told it was an MP3 player for review. Thinking this an excellent use of my limited free time, I took it home to play with.

The Slim Devices Squeezebox is a networked MP3 player that can either play music from your collection via its open source SlimServer or via Internet streams. Shipping with a power cable and RCA tulip cable, it also provides digital optical and coax outs as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack. This edition is the third generation, which comes in a much more attractive stand up form factor than two previous editions.

There are two versions available, one with 802.11g capabilities built in and one only with Ethernet. The 802.11g edition also ships with an Ethernet jack and can double as a bridge for other Ethernet-enabled devices. The wireless edition is available for $299 and the wired-only edition is $50 cheaper, both from their website.

The first step was to install the software provided by Slim Devices from their website. It is open source and written in Perl, with installers for Windows and Mac OS X as well as RPMs for Linux. I used a Windows laptop with an external drive that had a backup of my music. The installation went extremely smoothly, using a typical Windows installer. Within seconds, the server icon was in the system tray. My biggest issue was that the external drive was connected via USB 1.1 and scanning the 35 gigs of music stored there took over an hour.

On plugging in the device, I was very surprised to find a fluorescent display instead of the usual, inexpensive LCD. Flouros are much easier to see across a room or in the dark. The Squeezebox walked through a wizard-like process of configuring the network choices of wired vs. wireless, WEP key and IP address (DHCP or static) via the remote control. Although punching in a 128-bit hex key may seem inconvenient, it was quite easy due to the mapping of the characters to the numbers on the remote, similar to sending an SMS with a mobile phone. The Squeezebox even found the server on its own and was playing music in just a few minutes.

After it finished scanning my library, I played a few MP3s. I was immediately impressed by the quality of the audio and the speed with which hitting play via the web interface caused music to appear; lag was less than a second. I had assumed that as the laptop and the Squeezebox were both over 802.11g, collisions and traffic issues would be a problem. However, at no time did I ever notice any hiccups. I ran the Squeezebox for several hours while working and downloading a few Torrents, with no issue whatsoever. I also tried adding music to the queue via the remote control. The software on the device makes it very easy to navigate a large music collection using the remote to zip to the first character of any title, again like sending an SMS, hit 1 three time for 'C'. The + button on the remote allows you to add albums, songs or artists' libraries to the queue very easily.

I also played with the Internet radio tie-ins. It took very little time to sign up for a Live365 account and configure the Squeezebox for my account. Although the streams I found were low quality and quite busy, there were many options available including other streaming networks or purchasing a Live365 subscription for better quality streams.

After a week of use, I was very pleased with the SqueezeBox. It sounds fantastic and even using my wireless and USB 1.1 external drive didn't deter the ease of use. However, I had my PowerBook returned to me, which is my main music library and iTunes host. I proceeded to set it up as the primary server for the device. The installation was fairly easy (finding the long forgotten firewall settings took the most time), but the performance was atrocious. I read in the forums on Slimdevice's site that the daily builds have some performance fixes. I downloaded the latest build and still had no luck getting it to reliably play for more than a song. I then switched off the AirPort and plugged in an Ethernet cable and since, have had no problems whatsoever. As it worked fine with my Windows laptop, I am inclined to think it a problem with the Mac.

Since using the Mac, I've also turned on the iTunes integration. Supposedly, it will scan the iTunes library XML file to find playlists and new music nearly instantly compared to searching every MP3 file in a directory tree. I've not found that to be as reliable or easy as rumored on the forums on slimdevices.com. It would be much nicer if there was a "Reload iTunes file" button instead of trusting it will find your music after a user configurable period of time. It did, however, eventually find all of my playlists and make it very easy to play any one of them.

I've used the Squeezebox for another couple weeks with the Mac and have been very happy. The best parts are the reliability and audio quality; 192kb MP3s sound as good as my older Denon cd player to my non-audiophile ears. At $299, it is not an inconsiderably cheap piece of kit as one could build a basic PC to do this and more for a similar cost. However, with the attractive form factor, and great ease of use, I'm inclined to say it's worth it.

Comments

and more!

[yagu]

Pat's review is accurate. It is also incomplete (but for the squeezebox, that is easy to have happen... you just keep discovering more cool features).

Soooooooooo, in addition to his review I would add the following cool things about this device:

• the Squeezebox is served by the slimserver software. This server allows you to run and play songs from your browser/computer as well as other places (I know technically this isn't a "feature" of the Squeezebox, but it ties in to some other features).
• because it runs through slimserve, you can control the songs you hear via your browser -- that may sound mostly trick, but as with any fully featured piece of hardware, I find remotes only go so far before they're just plain cumbersome to use. (the Squeezebox remote IS a pretty good one, not perfect, but good).
• you can synchronize more than one Squeezebox so they play the same music at the same time throughout the house (or whatever). I've used this with no problems, but have read other reviews saying it doesn't always work perfectly... ymmv.
• the slimserver serving music to the Squeezebox supports plugins, and there are lots of them out there, some way cool. And, if you don't like any of those, you can roll your own.
• the Squeezebox has myriad options for how it looks when "idle", when "off", when "now playing", etc. It has some interesting screen savers considering the tiny real estate.
• you can listen to shoutcast/internet radio without your PC turned on -- it is built into the latest Squeezeboxes

So, you can see there is lots more than just stated in the review, and probably lots more than what I've shown.

I think Squeezebox is a great product (I own three). I am waiting for the day someone (hopefully SlimDevices) comes out with a decent and reasonably priced streaming device that has video out to display liner notes, lyrics, now playing, etc. (and, no, I'm NOT interested in a media center...)

ads?

[mooosenix]

the poor guy responsible for making ads work on Slashdot and other OSTG sites

Ads?

What ads?

No Ogg yet.

[Agent Green]

And, by itself, it still doesn't support Ogg Vorbis.

FLAC is a nice plus, though. :)

Re:No Ogg yet.

[ecloud]

But transcoding to FLAC is fine, I think. You don't lose any quality and it's half the bandwidth of streaming PCM. And even my slow server can do the transcoding just fine.

Nowadays when I rip CDs I encode to FLAC primarily, and also to MP3 if I want to be able to play it on devices that don't support anything else. But I play the FLACs at home. So I don't consider ogg as useful as I once did - it's lossy and it's not widely supported. Disk space is cheap, so why lose quality? abcde is a good program to use for the ripping BTW.

The OSX version does need work

[rmcd]

The review is correct that the OSX version does not work reliably. I find that the database becomes corrupt, something which never happened under Windows. It is also very slow to create the index. Apart from this Mac-only problem, it's a terrific device.

Squeezebox rocks!

[ecloud]

I've got 2 so far. There just isn't anything better right now. There aren't many alternatives for playing FLACs and OGGs at all. And the server software is free software, written in Perl! What more could a hacker ask for?

One nit...

[ecloud]

you do need a fairly fast machine to get that great performance to which the reviewer is referring. I'm trying to use an old dual-PII 233 machine and it's quite slow to serve up web pages, find tracks by artist, etc. Seems like it ought to be fast enough for this relatively simple task, but I guess perl is just slow. My perl is not threaded either, so all the load is on one of the processors, and lets the other be mostly idle. I've been wondering if there could be a way to compile it to machine code rather than having to run it interpreted?

One improvement is to use mysql instead of sqlite; I have done that, and it is still too slow. But on a 1 ghz or faster machine it's fine.

A bit more depth...

[jafo]

I've had one of the previous generation Squeezebox devices for a couple of years now, and I'm very happy with it. While I could have set up a Linux box doing this, I have limited time to fart around with things and the squeezebox just WORKED. The device itself support mp3 and uncompressed audio streaming, and since most of my music is in FLAC format (from ripped CDs), I thought I'd have problems with it. However, I just installed the software, let it dig around my music collection, and changed some firewall rules and was off and running.

The biggest complaint I have about it is that sometimes if the server is busy (scanning music again, for example), it will stutter during playback. A bigger buffer would be useful here I think.

Also note that the SlimServer software can be used without the device. In fact, if you want to try out how you will like a squeezebox, there is a Java applet that exactly emulates the squeezebox, including display, remote control, and more. A good way to tell if you are going to want to spend $300 on the box. See the http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/ softsqueeze web site for more information.

There's also a simpler client that can also talk to the slimserver that you can run. A friend has been running this on his stereo PC for several years now, without getting a squeezebox. It works great for him, and you control it via a browser on the slimserver, just like with the regular squeezebox.

The browser control of the server is another thing I love about it. If I'm on the patio or in the dining room with music playing, I can just use my laptop to change the volume, skip a song, or pause, instead of hunting down the remote. Plus it works really well to add a particular song we are talking about at a party or the like.

It's a great device. I got it on sale at $249, and am very happy with it. In fact, we have two of them. I want to add another one for the bathroom for showering tunes.

Sean

Hacker Friendly

[LynchMan]

I've had a SqueezeBox v1 for several years and I love it as well. I was originally interested in it because of the server software - that it was Open Source and written in PERL. Plus they encourage hacking of the hardware and of the software. Any company with those morals gets my support.

When I first got my SqueezeBox in the mail it would not play correctly - the sound was all distorted. I sent them an email and they told me to just open it up and see if anything was loose or broken from shipping. I asked "Won't that void my warranty?" and they just said no, don't worry about it. So I popped it open and found that there was a broken piece floating around in it. They just told me to send it back and they replaced it very quickly and covered all shipping charges.

Sure, you can run to your local electronics store and get a wireless MP3 player for less than the Squeezebox, but does it run on Linux, is the software Open Source, is the company 'Not Evil'?

If only more companies were like Slim Devices we would have some really cool things going on.

Squeezebox

[Anonymous Coward]

My Mama's got one of these. And my Daddy never sleeps at night.

Re:pricing

[Black Perl]

Why is the price $299 ?

It has a high-end DAC that rivals good stereo equipment. You can't get this kind of sound from a typical PC soundcard. It also has a very nice VFD display, S/PDIF outputs, a nice DSP. It supports lossless formats, FLAC, ogg, you name it. At the $299 price it includes 802.11g wifi. It has an extensive list of features in the firmware--alarm clock, full-screen visualizations, scrolling RSS feeds, extensive integratability (i.e. use xPL, a standard home automation protocol, to send messages to your Squeezeboxes). Given all it has, I think the price is reasonable.

any other alternatives to *slim which are not that expensive. ?

Second-generation ones on eBay.

Re:Unicode support

[seanadams.com]

Does the Squeezebox have proper unicode support? I listen to Japanese music mostly, and it would be sad if the device wouldn't display any of my tags.

In fact it does support Japanese very well - also Chinese, Hebrew, and Cyrillic.

Unicode support was one of the major updates that came as part of the 6.2 software update released along with Squeezebox 3.

Sean Adams
CEO, Slim Devices

Decent review, a little superficial

[amitola]

The reviewer seems to have covered all the basic information, but didn't emphasize some of the less obvious features that, for me, make the Squeezebox worth its price tag..

• Every conceivable output interface--optical SPDIF, coax SPDIF, headphone jack, RCA (although truth be told, you might as well just use the RCA output since the Squeezebox's DAC is probably better than the one you were going to plug it in to)
• Completely useable with just the remote and built-in display--some of these devices require a TV to provide a decent interface, and I hate having the TV on (not to mention the bedroom where there is no TV)
• Being able to sync multiple players--on those rare occasions when I have a party, I lock the players together and play one stream to the whole house without dragging cables around
• Wireless version also a wireless bridge (in v2 and v3)--if you have something else in the living room that wants to plug in to the network, like a game console, this feature saves you an extra $75 right there.
• Transparently plays any file format you've got--the box itself can decode mp3, flac, or straight PCM, but if you have something else the server will decode it on the fly and stream it to the box. Although this does require you to have some CPU power on the machine running slimserver, of course.
• It has no onboard storage--for me this is a feature, because otherwise there would be yet more copies of the music that needed constant maintenance to stay up to date, like the iPods

Also, I happen to be one of those people that has to compulsively hack up every device to do unnatural things, which means that the open-source Perl server is critical (even though it is kind of a beast). Some more neat things for hackers:

• You can directly control the text on the display (actually you can do bitmapped graphics on the v2 and v3 models), so people have it scroll their emails as they come in, RSS headlines, play Tetris, caller ID when the phone rings,whatever
• You get notification of button presses on the remote control, which you can reprogram to do whatever you want: make your computer do something, or send X10 automation commands if you've got your geek on to that degree
• It can pass through arbitrary PCM streams, so you can even play weird stuff like DTS-encoded 5.1 channel wav files
• You can of course integrate it with any other web pages you were writing, so you can do the all-important now playing on your blog
• The slimserver does everything in plain old HTTP including mp3 streaming, so you can use your whole TCP bag of tricks like ssh port forwarding to connect an xmms client from work, for example
• The server can do bandwidth limiting per client. You could have a local player at home set for unlimited bandwidth so the server will send a lossless stream and you won't miss a single precious bit, and another player at work connected through ssh, and the server will automatically transcode everything to the maximum bitrate you set
• It has a plugin interface, so you can get lots of these tricks to work without writing the code yourself

I know there's lots I'm forgetting but I have to try to get this post in while there is still a chance somebody will see it...