Comments on: Squeezebox

By: Jon Stahl's Journal » Blog Archive » Give your Squeezebox Server enough RAM

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:25:47 +0000

[...] had a Squeezebox as my digital music system for over three years now; it’s still one of the best few hundred bucks I’ve ever spent on [...]

By: Jon Stahl’s Journal » Blog Archive » Controlling a Squeezebox from an iPhone/iPod Touch

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:42:50 +0000

[...] and so the first thing I tried to make it do was serve as a sexy touchscreen remote control for my Squeezebox digital music player.A quick search immediately led me to iPeng, an iPhone/iPod Touch skin for the Squeezebox web [...]

By: squeeze me « mattbrown musings

squeeze me « mattbrown musings — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:16:28 +0000

[...] up a bit of an appetite for this Squeezebox. I crawled around the web a bit more, and found a very interesting blog post which discussed the item. And I discussed the item with a tech-savvy friend at work who agreed it [...]

By: Nonreality

Nonreality — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 05:36:11 +0000

PS: You might want to look into dbpoweramp. It’s ripper is just as or better than EAC and it will rip and encode to 2 or more codecs. Plus it will convert any music that you have. I have mine rip mp3’s or ogg to my itunes music folder and flac to an archive folder. I also have it set the replay gain at the same time. Then I make a folder called slimmusic and put shortcuts to both folders in it and make it my music folder for the squeezebox. That way if you have more than one folder you just add shortcuts and it will find them.

By: Nonreality

Nonreality — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 05:25:45 +0000

I’ve got one! It’s got to be one of the funnest and best tech devices I have ever seen. I added the XM radio plugin and now I have almost too much selection. Very slick, I’ve been playing a lot of Flac and ogg along with mp3 and all work great. I upgraded to a new Yamaha receiver at the same time and it all sounds fantastic through my, new sounding, B&W speakers. Anyway, thanks for pushing me over the edge on my Squeezebox.

By: Nonreality

Nonreality — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:56:25 +0000

You’re making me really want one. I’m using an old phillips wireless transmitter that works surprisingly good but would like the quality of the Squeezebox. The guy above didn’t understand why you use EAC at all. You use it so you don’t have to listen to every song on every album to make sure it ripped correctly. I think he has such a “false sense of superiority” that he didn’t even look into EAC because it wasn’t made by beloved Apple. I love my Rockboxed Nano but there are a lot of other great things for music out there, like the programs you described. Thanks for the info.

By: Sergio

Sergio — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 08:38:23 +0000

Yeah, I recently bought a Squeezebox too, after investigating a lot about what was best for me, and you are right, you use a lot of different software to achieve what you really want, but I must say it was actually fun trying to come up with the best posible way of experiencing my music. And I use too almost the same software: Slimserver, Foobar2000 for Replaygain, EAC for ripping, FLAC for digital format, but instead of Mp3Tag I use MusicBrainz Picard and I’m trying to run MusicIP Headless Server, since I have all my music on a Debian PC dedicated to my music, and I use mp3fs for transcoding FLAC to mp3 on the fly.

By: Jon Stahl

Jon Stahl — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:59:32 +0000

Rahul- I'm not in pursuit of any kind of musical purity. I did, however, choose to base my solution on open source standards and software, rather than buying into Apple's attempt at fostering lock-in.

I don't have an iPod, and I don't want one. I wanted a solution for digitizing my music on my desktop computer, and playing it on my existing stereo. The Squeezebox fit the bill perfectly.

I can't hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 or AAC, but I figure that audio formats will evolve, that disk space is cheap, that ripping CDs is a pain, and that lossless open-source digitization makes a lot of sense for someone like me who has moderate technical skills.

By: Rahul M

Rahul M — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:01:56 +0000

This pursuit of musical purity is amusing, but quite specious. Ripping with EAC+FLAC has no discernible benefits over iTunes+AAC (or MP3), other than givng you a false sense of superiority. Your listening environment will overwhelm any theoretical benefits of FLAC over AAC, all the more so if you're using "unremarkable cheapo stereo components". Most home stereo setups are so sub-optimal that you may as well make a silk purse out of a sow's ear than spend time squeezing out all those FLAC bits.

The open format advantage is also mostly theoretical. The market domination of iTunes+iPod has led to the creation of an unrivalled array of hardware and software for that platform. Is the theoretical future-proofness of an open format worth the very real cost of being locked out of the iPod economy now? It isn't for me. And I'd wager that in 20 years, Apple is still around but FLAC isn't.

I'm neither an Apple evangelist nor an open source opponent. I just think this is a convoluted solution to an imaginary problem.

By: Jon Stahl

Jon Stahl — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:50:20 +0000

@Peter E:
I don’t own an iPod, but if I did, I’d probably do what you’re suggesting. Thanks for the suggestion!