Knowledge Base:Gadgets:Squeezebox

From TWUUG

The Slim Devices Squeezebox music system has the following components.

• A book sized audio player with VF display
• A candy-bar sized remote control
• Slim Server application running on one of your hosts

Slim Server is written in perl and runs as a Windows service, or as a daemon on Mac OS X, Linux, and the BSD crowd. The Squeezebox player has an external switching power supply and connects to the stereo or SPDIF optical inputs of an audio system. It comes in wireless and wired Ethernet models. The wireless model can provide Ethernet bridging between the wired and wirless networks.

The Squeezebox has two operating modes, SlimServer mode and Squeeze Network mode. The SlimServer mode offers access to media stored on the SlimServer host and to Internet radio and podcasts. The SqueezeNetwork mode offers access to Live365, Pandora, and selected Internet radio stations (the better known ones like WGBH, WXPN, KCRW, etc). Squeeze Network allows you to register your players and will store radio playlists for you.

The SlimServer mode allows you to play music stored on the SlimServer host. Once you have installed SlimServer, browse to it (http://localhost:9000), pick the server settings link, and set the music library root using the form appearing on the server settings page. SlimServer indexes your music library and generates browsing pages for it and any play lists. You can control the Squeezebox using a browser. I do this when listening at my desk. You can also create playlists by hand using the browser interface.

SlimServer is required to play local media. Once a radio stream is started however, Squeezebox is able to play the stream without assistance from SlimServer. It will play the WHRV WMA stream while SlimServer is stopped. When SlimServer restarts, it will reinitialize the player.

Using the IR remote control, you can navigate through your iTunes library and play lists to locate a particular title. Searches by album and artist are supported and any regular or smart playlist you've built in iTunes can be selected, shuffled, and played. The slimserver transcodes media from the stored format to one of a couple of formats liked by the Squeezebox.

Slim http://www.squeezenetwork.com lets you register players and favorites. You can play Squeeze network titles without having your local Slimserver running. You can also subscribe to Live 365, Pandora, and some others and listen to these without local host support.

The Squeezebox is an interesting device. Slim Server is open source and Squeezebox is a Linux gadget that is fairly open. It can be skinned and user-written plug-ins are supported. I use Public Radio Fan (www.publicradiofan.com) to catch some of the things I enjoy (World Cafe, for example) at more convenient times. PRMF is a multi-service program guide to North American and European public broadcasting. A slim plug-in lets you browse the currently playing stuff using the Squeezebox remote and display. It has two parts, an add-in to slimserver and an addin UI in the squeezebox. Cool. AlienStream plugin lets you play any of the formats supported by the xine library of codecs. AlienBBC lets you listen to BBC streams and podcasts. Other plugins let you create Internet Radio station lists. It should be possible to modify SlimServer to pause live radio and to record live radio but, to my knowledge, this has not been done.

SlimServer installation is easy on MacOS, Linux (RedHat and Debian), and Windows. Mac and Windows installers handle the chores for those environments and will install perl if needed. Installation on Debian is easy. Slim provides a .deb package and apt-get and dpkg know what to do. The RedHat instructions include dependencies. As always, you are on your own to satisfy them.

Plug-in installation is easy. You acquire and unzip the plug-in archive and place it in the library directory following the developer's instructions. You may need to use CPAN to grab some additional perl modules. For the plug-ins I have installed, the developer has listed the dependencies and given perl installation instructions including any required CPAN commands. Once all of the modules are in the correct place, restart slimserver using the control panel, /etc/init.d scripts, or preferences panel as described in the SlimServer installation instructions.

The founders have sold the company to Logitech (Swiss, actually) which should give some staying power. I'm hoping the founders stay involved. They are good audiophiles and open source advocates. Everything about the device is better than it has to be.

• It has Apple gorgeous cosmetics.
• It has a turquoise vacuum flourescent display that can be adjusted in brightness and type size
• It has high quality audio D/A converters and line drivers
• It has a high efficiency switching power supply that runs cool

I'd recommend the Squeezebox highly to those of you wanting high quality stereo audio output for any computer music usage. Slim Devices did good. This beast is cleaner than my Marantz 67 CD player (see http://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/cd67.html), sounds simply stunning on the new Love CD (hear a taste at http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/archives/beatleslove), Geordie Kelly's Triple Play recorded in VB (clips at http://www.geordiekelly.com/music.html), and other high quality source material. Squeezebox 3 is highly recommended for music listeners.