Slim Devices Squeezebox

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a Squeezebox.

The Squeezebox is a device that receives audio input from a computer by either WiFi or a wired ethernet connection. The Squeezebox has both analog (rca jacks) and digital (s/pdif) audio outputs. It can stream mp3, aiff, wav, flac, and other format audio files, including AAC (but not, of course, those protected by Apple's DRM scheme), and can use iTunes playlists.

All of the music files live on the computer, which runs the Slim server software.The Slim server is written in Perl and the code is open source.

The Squeezebox can be controlled either with the included remote and navigated by the two-line flourescent readout on the device itself, or from the computer from a browser-based interface. The browser interface feels pretty clunky compared to native desktop interfaces like iTunes, but it's serviceable.

Setup was painless (once I remembered to modify the firewall settings on my Powerbook), and the audio quality is just fine, at least to my admittedly middle aged, former rock musician ears.

While I've had no problems with running the Squeezebox on my Mac, at first I could not get the server to run on my Windows XP machine, leading to a whole other set of adventures, which I'll chronicle in a separate post.

There is a large and active community of people using the Squeezebox, and the company appears to be very involved and responsive to the users.

All in all, I think this box will be the cure for CD proliferation around my house, allowing most of my music to live on hard disks and the original CD media to server as backups stored somewhere out of sight.