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.

Responsbile for the ads working, eh?

[TheLetterPsy]

Pat Schoonveld (the poor guy responsible for making ads work on Slashdot and other OSTG sites).

Now I know who to be pissed at when a /. flash-based ad causes Firefox to munch CPU. Granted, it wasn't Pat that made the ad, but at least I can now point my finger!!

(Yeah, yeah, I know -- FlashBlock, AdBlock and all that jazz)

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.

Reading this... really gives me an idea.

[Grey Ninja]

WiFi for the Nintendo DS is currently in the process of being hacked. After it's done, I can't help but think that this would be among one of the PERFECT homebrew apps for the system, assuming that the device does what I think it does. The way I understand it, this device streams music from your home PC, and plays it for you, with an interface to change songs. The DS would make a fantastic platform for this, as it has a touch screen and is more than capable of decoding MP3/Vorbis on the fly... 4MB of Memory is more than enough for a buffer as well. If nobody else develops a client for this for Nintendo DS, I just might be interested in coding it myself, as this is something that has always been #1 in my list of wants for Nintendo DS homebrew. (Although before now, I hadn't really thought about how it should work).

Unicode support

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Squeezebox rocks!

[magikus]

Yes, the box is great. But what really makes a difference is the company and their approach to customers. One time they posted instructions on how to open the box and add a capacitor to fix the headphones hum issue. And the operation did not void the warranty!

Cool toy for geeks and others too! Here is a good review:

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/equipment/12 05/slimdevices_squeezebox.htm [enjoythemusic.com]

Cheers,

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.

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 [obstrepero.us] 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...

RSS feeds

[kefa]

how did I hear about this review? my squeezebox delivered slashdot rss headlines to my living room!

Re:The OSX version does need work

[toddbruner]

I've been running slimserver on OS X 10.3 for quite a while with no problems what-so-ever. Great performance (Dual 1Ghz G4) The forums for Slimserver (see slimdevices.com) are great with active participation from Slim devices employees.

Many factors can impact the performance of the slimserver which are beyond its control. Too many services or programs running, badly fragemented or slow disks, size of music library to index, etc. The fact that it works well for so many by default is a testament to this software.

Re:Reading this... really gives me an idea.

[Grey Ninja]

Yeah, that's another thing that I was thinking about. I have always wanted to build myself a media server to do stuff like play DVDs, play music, play Xvid movies, or that sort of thing. But I've been kind of stumped as to how to go about actually controlling the thing. A remote control doesn't offer the power or flexibility that a person would want. A keyboard and mouse defeats the purpose. Web control seemed to be the best option to me. But that would still require a person to control the PC with a laptop or a computer in another room, which is still clunky as hell.

Now a DS on the other hand... is affordable, you probably always have it with you, it has a touch screen, and is perfectly capable of controlling a server. In sleep mode, a DS will last a very long time without a recharge... it's the perfect device for controlling such a server.

Methinks that I have a programming project in the near future. :) (It seems that the UDP library for the DS has been submitted for review... meaning I should probably start coding the basic interface in the next week or two).

Re:I prefer not having server software...

[Xenna]

Interesting. The whole point of running a server IMHO (which you must do to store the MP3 files) is that you can just run software on it and forget about it.

I bought my first SliMP3 device 3 years ago (after thinking about an Audiotron) and I've been finding more and more applications for it (and the Squeezebox that I bought later). The latest adition is using it to control my 3-tuner MythTV box (yes, more server software).

The Squeezeboxes are an excellent example of devices that just become more and more valuable as time goes by. As the server software is perfected and new plugins become available.

I never regretted getting one instead of the Audiotron.

X.