Graham White: My Notes

Having recently had my little whinge about setting up the SqueezeBox Duet it's about time I said something about the box itself. Both professional and user reviews around the web are pretty much universally glowing with praise for it and I have to say to a large extent I agree.

First of all, there's the hardware which is sleek looking with a glossy black finish. The hardware is in two parts (ignore the odd cable here and there), the SqueezeBox Receiver:

Which, while not belittling the technicality of it, is to the consumer essentially just a dumb receiver box. It takes an audio stream over either a wired or wireless Ethernet connection and spits it out through your stereo using a digital or analogue audio connection. Then there's the controller:

Which is an altogether more exciting piece of kit. It's a wifi-device that can talk directly to your wifi router or be bridged onto your wired network via the Receiver if you don't have wifi. It features a rather strangely arranged set of controls that become familiar after a little usage. There is a jog dial with selection button, then buttons for playback, volume, control of the playlist and navigation around the menus. As you can see, it's got a nice full colour LCD display too. This means you can wander around anywhere within wireless range, control your music and get feedback directly on the device on just about anything you might want to know.

Software wise, things also come in two parts (well three if you count the firmware on the receiver). There's the software on the controller and some software to run on your PC which is listed as optional but I would consider very much essential. Both of these parts are open source with decent plugin interfaces and documented APIs you can access.

The controller runs a customised embedded Linux distributions known as Squeeze OS which is responsible for running the user interface application on the controller called Squeeze Play. The nice thing about this is you can take the user interface part, Squeeze Play, and run it on your desktop too. While the controller software is open source and pluggable, I haven't found anybody having written any useful applets to run within Squeeze Play yet but it's still early days so hopefully those people producing screen savers will come up with some good ideas for applets. That said, I can have a bit of a hack around too to see how easy it is to program for and whether I can produce something useful too.

The open source server software is called Squeeze Center and should be run somewhere with access to your local music collection. It supports a huge number of formats including flac, ogg and mp3 of course. Squeeze Center is hugely flexible and configurable, mostly through a bunch of supplied plugins. It provides a web interface as well as access to other interfaces so it can also be used to control the music playing as well as being the configuration hub for the entire setup.

Out of the box Squeeze Center provides access to your local music collection via a number of sorting methods (such as by artist, album, song, genre, etc) as well as providing standard playlist functionality. It also allows you to listen to Internet radio through a number of free and paid for services such as shout cast streams, mp3tunes and last.fm (a last.fm scrobbler plugin is also included). It gives you a favourites menu so you can tag anything as a favourite and later get quick access to it through this menu. Last but not least there's the Extras which doesn't do a huge amount out of the box (this is where most 3rd party plugins are accessed) but it does give you access to podcasts - you can subscribe to RSS or OPML podcast feeds and have them streamed to your hi-fi, cool!

I like to use dynamic playlists and that's some functionality that doesn't get included by default so I've found some plugins that do that for me now. Being a UK resident I want access to the BBC audio content and some kind person has written a plugin to access all their content too, including Live Radio streams, listen again streams as well as BBC podcasts. The final plugin I'm finding useful at the moment is one that automatically adds tracks to my music collection when I copy them to my music directory using a groovy Linux kernel feature, Inotify, otherwise you have to rescan your collection manually after adding new tracks. The plugins I've installed are tagged in Delicious.

Overall, the system seems to work very well. It's great having the flexibility of having an entire music collection at your finger tips ready to play, no messing with things that spin any more, and having access to all the additional content over the Internet is another real bonus. The packaging and interface of the components are really nice and are only set to get better over time, particularly as they're open source. This means I can get my hands on extra code in the form of those useful plugins as well as writing my own. But it also means when Slim Devices get caught up in adding support for new products or bug fixing as they inevitably will, new functionality will always be progressing at least through the community. So now I've got everything fixed up in my config, listening to music at home is quite a cool experience, happy days!

Back in the middle of May I decided to set up my home stereo properly in our new house so I ordered a new stereo (an Onkyo CR-515) and decided to replace an old Thinkpad I used to store my digital music collection with a new device on the market from Slim Devices, the SqueezeBox Duet and a low-power PC as a media server.

Initially I wasn't able to set it up as I was experimenting with using a Linksys NSLU2 (or slug) as the media server. Unfortunately, this was vastly underpowered for the job so I had to re-think that part of my solution. In late June I had my new server so I looked out some pictures I took while unpacking and wrote my first post about the SqueezeBox Duet.


It's only now I'm able to write that I've successfully set up my complete solution as of the start of September. I've been having huge difficulties getting the box to stream audio properly with all sorts of symptoms. I'll spare the long description and cut to the solution, I changed my wireless router settings from its default channel 11 setting to channel 1 and everything sprung into life. During my 3 months of debugging to find this simple solution I contacted Slim Devices through various means, forums, chat channels, and official support. While the staff were extremely keen to help and reasonably responsive given the time difference between California and the UK, at no point did they give me any useful suggestions towards the successful solution. It was this that prompted me to think about the different types of open source. Now I can conclude that you're pretty much on your own with a SqueezeBox, but that's something I can live with quite easily, so now it's working I'm a happy bunny.

For future reference, next time I move house I'll do a scan of the local wireless networks much earlier and change my channel accordingly. I'm no wireless expert but then I'm no dummy either, so when I can communicate over my wireless network with several devices including more than one laptop, a Nintendo Wii and the SqueezeBox Duet Controller, I would suggest it's reasonable to expect the other half of the Duet (the Receiver) to work too. Not so apparently.

I've had my Squeezebox Duet at home for quite some time now, since I was experimenting with using a slug as a home media server. I've been waiting for my replacement for the slug for some time now and it's still not arrived so the home media server project has stalled somewhat at the moment. However, I do still have the Squeezebox set up and even though I'm not really using it right now here's what you get in the box when you buy one...

The packaging feels very nice indeed, as it should along with the rest of the stuff in the box given the price if I'm honest. Once you slide the box out of it's card sleeve you're faced with a rather sleek minimal looking flip top black box:


The next thing is to flip that lid up and you see a very neatly laid out set of Squeezebox gear which I've positioned after a little unpacking:


So in the box we have a whole array of different stuff. There is, of course, the squeezebox remote and the receiver boxes, these are powered via some reasonably small AC-DC transformers which have changeable plugs. Plugs are supplied for European, US and UK sockets so you don't have to worry about getting a localised unit for your area which is a neat trick. The remote control has a charging stand so you can return it to its cradle when you're finished using it and it will stay charged all the time. You also get a set of reasonable length RCA leads to connect the receiver to your amplifier. Last, you get a fairly minimal manual which I've hardly used as all the best documentation is on-line:


Setting up really is very trivial, it's just a case of connecting all the wires, so power to the receiver and the remote charging stand, and a connection from the receiver to the amplifier. Once you've done this, just permit access by the two wireless devices (the receiver and the remote are both wi-fi) to your access point. Both devices DHCP and you're up and running with a squeezebox duet, nice and simple. This does, however, only get you Internet provided services if you want to get the full benefit of streaming your own music collection you need the Squeeze Centre software too, and hence I'm still waiting for my media server to be delivered before I get full functionality from my Squeezebox.

Having recently upgraded my home audio system, the choice of which media streamer to go for was not a hard decision. There are a few different manufacturers out there producing different types of hardware that would result in completely different solutions. These seem to be categorised into roughly three areas.

First, you have the traditional hi-fi system manufacturers who are adding more modern media methods to their kit. Sony have the gigajuke systems with built-in hard disks, while phillips have the streamium systems. I discounted these fairly early on as being rather expensive and full of gimicks I wouldn't really care about or use, while not providing the full functionality that I really wanted at a price I was happy with.

Next there are the traditional NAS manufacturers who are upgrading their firmware to include media streaming functionality. This was slightly more tempting in some ways than a stereo system with this functionality built in. However, the lack of remote control or feedback without a PC switched on was very off-putting here.

What I really wanted was something to stream music from a PC to an existing stereo system that provided good feedback to the user with a remote control too. Enter the third set of devices, the dedicated media streamers designed to work with various media servers such as Firefly, SlimServer, iTunes, etc. When looking at these, my choices were quickly narrowed to a set of 3 possible candidates, in descending order of price:

1. A collection of various Sonos hardware
   
2. A SqueezeBox Duet from Slim Devices (now owned by Logitech
   
3. A Pinnacle Soundbridge
   

I would have dearly liked to get my hands on the market leading Sonos which tops all the reviews while having the reviewer salivate over their nicely designed hardware, excellent interface and crystal sound quality. However, coming in at £700 sterling it seemed a bit expensive, especially as I would be spending more on another hi-fi system too, so it was reluctantly ruled out quite early on.

The next rejection waas the Pinnacle Sound Bridge, rejected for many reasons. It's easily the cheapest of the three on the list at under £100 though. I found it very difficult to find a dealer in the UK who had these things in stock so that was one rather off-putting factor - if there's no demand, then how good could the product be? The killer for me was when I compared to the Roku Soundbridge though. I found out Pinnacle license the soundbridge technology from an American firm, Roku, for marketing in Europe. That's all very well, except the European Soundbridge is inferior (much smaller and less usable display). This annoyed me to such an extent I felt I couldn't buy the European model and there are no American models for sale over here, except possibly some second hand ones on eBay.


The option I went for is the Slim Devices SqueezeBox Duet which seems like a really nice bit of kit, although not exactly cheap to buy either. It comes in two parts, the receiver box you hook up to your stereo system, and the remote control you use to browse and control the music.

The receiver is a pretty simple box, it has an Ethernet port, built-in wireless, RCA analogue audio output, and a digital output too. It sits on your network waiting for commands from the squeezebox controller and outputting any media streams it receives to a stereo (or powered speakers).

The controller is a little more interesting. It's also a wireless device, and has a jog wheel and LCD screen. Wireless means you don't have to have line of sight to the receiver, so you can hide the receiver away somewhere out of sight near your stereo. The interface is quite polished and very easy to understand. It's firmware upgradeable too so it'll only get better over time.

One of the things I really love about the SqueezeBox stuff is their openness. They use open source development to produce the SqueezeCentre (formerly slimserver) media streamer and as such it's got a nice little community of people outside the main company producing plugins to do all sorts of stuff as you can imagine. They adopt a similar approach for their firmware as well, while I've not come across the source code yet (I've not looked to see if it's available), the controller has some nice open type touches to it such as the ability to use your flickr pictures as the screensaver on the LCD screen when it's not in use. Overall I hope, and I think, I've made a good choice.

Related to my previous post "Out with the old" I have been thinking about what's next for me in terms of a home media solution. I've also been spurred on by my recent purchase of a Current Cost meter which I can hook up to a computer, but more about that another time. Similar to my old system, I'm not bothered about video so this is purely an audio solution.

There are some things I took into consideration when building the old system that I don't consider to be so important this time around. I'm not bothered about browsing the Internet on my TV and I'm prepared to spend a bit more cash, for example. But rather than concentrate on those points, here's a list of things I would like to include in the new system:

• Switchable speakers in different rooms (kitchen and living room)
  
• Connection to my stereo amplifier
  
• Access to my mp3 collection without leaving my PC powered on
  
• Access to Internet music (podcasts, radio, etc)
  
• Remotely controlled
  
• Separate screen (from the TV)
  

After much research, here's what I've come up with:
Click to enlarge.

I'm going to use a Linksys NSLU2 (a.k.a. a SLUG) which can be modified to run Linux so I can hack it into submission to be my low powered music server. The SLUG will provide my music collection over my wireless network to a Slim Devices Squeezebox Duet system. The Squeezebox is also able to access all the Internet services I want and similar to the SLUG runs open source software so has a fantastic community of users. The Duet comes with a wifi remote control with built-in LCD screen so I can interact with the system from anywhere in the house. From the Squeezebox is an audio connection to the amplifier which, similarly to my old system, is connected to a speaker switcher box.

That little lot should keep me busy for a while and give me all I want from music at home. As I mentioned, a lot of research went into deciding which components to choose. The weak link here will likely be the SLUG because it's such a small box with only 32Mb RAM and a relatively slow processor (just 264 bogomips) but it should do for the time being. Here's my component list:

• Onkyo CR-515 (stereo micro-system)
  
• Tannoy Mercury F1 (living room speakers)
  
• Denon SCM-50 (kitchen speakers)
  
• SqueezeBox Duet (media streamer)
  
• Linksys NSLU2 (music storage)
  
• Freecom Mobile Drive (USB hard disk)
  
• QED MA17 (2 way speaker switcher)