Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Squeezebox 3rd Generation (pics)

Building a digital jukebox has been on the list for many months, and with other projects having priority, its still way down the list. I have researched the Squeezebox in the past, so over the weekend decided to order one and see how it works out. It arrived today and took a few pics.





The control is available for ethernet ($ 249) or wireless ($ 299), and a choice of Black or White. The SlimServer open Source software is available online at no charge, and uses Peral scripting. The decision was made to install the software on one of the Sun servers here, and the pc boxes would just access it over the network. Ken had spent many hours converting the CD collection and it is mostly completed, we now have access to 574 albums, with 5,500 songs, by 202 artist from all computers as well as the Squeezebox.
Since we have wireless, it was easy to set up and connect the box to the Halo C2 using a optical connection. Only took about 15 minutes to have it up and playing tunes. The software allows one to browse a music collection by albums, artist, artwork, genres, years, and a few others. The Squeezebox does some other cool stuff, still playing with it.




Have been listening to music for about 6 hours now, and the system is working perfectly with no problems. Will do some comparing the qulaity to the orignal CD at some point, but at this point if there is any great loss of quality, have not heard it so far. Having access to the collection and being able to program music for any lengthof listening period is nice to have. A link for the box is below for any interested in more info on it.

Squeezebox

Nice job, Tharkun. As you may realize I recently posted a mini-review of the Squeezebox that I purchased a month or so ago. I went with the 2nd generation version though just because it's form-factor is slightly shorter and fits in my stereo cabinet better. The new one really looks nice though!

I hope you have as much fun with yours as I'm having with mine.

Nice stuff! As usual, I'm envious. I didn't realize that they were so small!

Thanks for the initial comments. I'm especially interested in your comments regarding sound quality. If there is no discernable quality loss on a system as nice as yours, then I certainly will have nothing to worry about.

What did your rip your CD collection to - mp3/wma/FLAC/other?

All are in mp3 format and the software used on the Sun boxes was cdrtools.

I actually received something similar for Christmas:

Roku Soundbridge

I can't comment yet on how effective it is because i have been too busy to get the proper software installed on the PC. Looks like pretty simple setup & operation though. Will be connected wirelessly. I figure if it works 1/2 as well as advertised it should be a great addition.

CNET Review was very positive.

I have been researching this unit a lot lately and am definitely going to get one. I'm currently building a dedicated music server for it. My question is how to connect it wirelessly. Can you connect peer to peer to the computer with a wireless card attached or does it actually need a wireless router? I'm stupid when it comes to this wireless stuff.

About the sound. Well, it's got Burr-Brown DAC's in it, so I'm assuming that the sound quality is good. Of course, it can be connected digitally as well.

This info is from Slimdevices.com "11 Mbps 802.11b and 54Mbps 802.11g are both supported. Both infrastructure and ad-hoc modes are supported, so you can connect to a wireless router, wireless access point, or even directly to a computer that has a wireless network interface."
So yes, you should be able to do it, try asking on the Slimdevices forum for more info.

Squeezebox Forum

Is it possible to implement multiple Squeezebox "clients" all pointing to the same server? If so, can they access different content simultaneously?

Yes one can do that, it was a bit of a pain to set up here, the server software is running on one of the Sun boxes, two of us run pc boxes. After some playing and fustration, the computer geeks here had it working here. The Squeezebox on the HT system and each of our three puters can all acess the software and each play differant tunes. So it is working out well, I prefer it over the Sony mega players Tom.