One of the coolest things about the Squeezebox is the fact that it’s powered by open-source software with a vibrant ecosystem of third-party plugins that extend its features in all sorts of cool ways.  I’m now closing in on four years of ecstatic Squeezebox ownership, and I just realized I’d never shared the “must have” plugins that really make the Squeezebox really sing.   Here’s a quick rundown on how I’ve achieved open-source digital audio nirvana.

1. MusicIP.  Even though it’s sort-of-abandonware at this point, MusicIP is still the single most compelling add-on for Squeezebox.  If you’ve used iTunes’ “Genius” feature, it’s sort of like that, except lots smarter.  MusicIP actually generates an acoustic analysis of all of your songs.  Then, given a starting song, artist, album or genre, it can find other songs that actually sound similar, which makes for an amazing way to take a “semi-random walk” through your music collection.  Not only is MusicIP much smarter than iTunes’ misnamed Genius, it’s very configurable, so you can decide how random those mixes are.  (Note: even if you’re not running a Squeezebox, you can still use MusicIP standalone or with iTunes.)   MusicIP has single-handedly revolutionized the way I listen to music, and more than anything else, I think it really unlocks the power of an all-digital music experience.
2. TrackStat.  Long a favorite of the Squeezebox cognoscenti, I’m a recent adopter of TrackStat, Erland Isaksson’s amazing music statistics plugin.   TrackStat lets you rate your songs–and even better–it auto-rates songs as you play them.  Play something through to completion, and its rating goes up.  Skip it before it gets halfway finished and the rating goes down.  It also keeps track of how often each song gets played.  Over time, it builds up a very rich library of stats about your listening preferences, without you having to lift a finger.   Then, Erland’s companion plugin Dynamic Playlists lets you easily build playlists based on your stats, for example to find your favorite not-recently-played songs.  Good stuff.
3. NPR Radio.  Makes it one-click easy to get your favorite NPR stations or programs streaming on your Squeezebox.  Now if only KUOW would drop the incredibly repetitive 15-second promo spot they tack onto the beginning of each streaming session, I’d be in internet radio heaven!
4. Lazy Search Music.  Hey, I’m lazy!  Lazy Search Music makes it way easier to quickly search for music using the Squeezebox’s numeric keypad-based remote control.  Without Lazy Search, Squeezeserver requires multiple button-pushes  to enter each search character.  With Lazy Search, you just press each letter once and it does fuzzy matching, which is much much faster.
5. FindArt. Lets you find missing cover art for your albums.  It’s not truly a mass search-and-download tool (for that I use a standalone program called Album Art Downloader), but it’s a really handy tool for filling in gaps.

The Squeezebox’s server software runs on a server.  Since 2006, I’ve been using an old Dell Dimension 2350 that we had lying around.  But this weekend, I upgraded (slightly) to a Dell Dimension 3000 that my employer Groundwire excessed from its inventory.   Wow, what a difference!

The old server had 512MB of RAM and a 2GHZ Celeron. My “new” server has a 1.25GB of RAM and a 3GHZ Pentium 4.  My music library is about 24,000 tracks (that’s large-ish, but not huge by community standards, it seems).   While my old box never swapped, it was often running pretty close to its RAM limits, and the web interface could be sluggish at times.  Under the new server, it’s smooth and fast.  I suspect it’s additional RAM rather than the faster processor that’s making most of the difference.  I also swapped in a set of optimized MySQL caching settings (thanks Squeeze community!), which allows the system to take more advantage of its increased RAM.

Bottom line: I shoulda upgraded the RAM years ago. 

Molly got an iPod Touch last week, 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 interface. (Continuing a fine open-source tradition of powerful products with goofy names, I might add.) Eureka, I thought, I’m home free. It’s simple, elegant, has had five releases, and most of the folks in the Squeezbox community seem to be quite impressed.

Unfortuntely, I’m finding it to be unusably slow. All of the pages except for the homepage timeout. Now, I know that the iPhone/iPod Safari will only wait about five seconds for a server to respond, but surely my Squeezebox can manage that. Apparently not.

I’m not sure whether the problem is:

• My large-ish music library (~25,000 tracks)
• My slow-ish server CPU (Celeron 2.4 GHz)
• ??

The iPeng skins seems to work pretty well when I hit it with laptop web browser.

I’m bummed. Any ideas?

SqueezeCenter 7 is a massive, game-changing improvement on the old SlimServer software, which was no slouch.  The biggest change is a seriously overhauled user interface, which takes great advantage of AJAX to offer a rich, eye-pleasing experience.  There are also a bunch of changes under the hood, but previous versions of SlimServer were so feature-rich that these are mostly incremental.

If you’ve got a Squeezebox (or a Transporter), SqueezeCenter 7 is a must-have upgrade.  I’ve been using beta versions for the past few months, and it’s been a stable, enjoyable experience.

Now, if only I had a Duet.  I lust for that remote control. 

First of all, a quick rundown on my setup. I’ve got:

• A Squeezebox 3 digital music player, connected to…
• A pile of unremarkable cheapo stereo components in my living room
• A garden variety PC running Windows XP in the office
• A 500 GB external hard drive connected to the PC

Why did I choose the Squeezebox in the first place? Couple reasons.

1. I have a lot of music, and I wanted to digitize it once, without data loss, and in an open, non-proprietary format. So using an iPod as my primary music storage device was right out.
2. My computer is fairly far from my stereo, and running either speaker wire or ethernet cable from computer to stereo wasn’t feasible.
3. I didn’t want to spend money on a NAS (network attached storage) device, or clutter up my living room with a computer. (I briefly thought of buying a Mac Mini, but $600 was a bit rich for my blood.)

The $300 Squeezebox (plus another $220 for a big ol’ external hard drive) was an affordable solution that would let me store and play high-quality digital music with few compromises.

So, how are things going, two months in?

In a word, I’m thrilled. I’ve all of my and Molly’s ~200 CDs ripped, plus a bunch of live music I’ve downloaded from archive.org. We’re finding that we’re listening to a lot more music than we used to, simply because it’s all so accessible.

I was somewhat surprised at the number of technical decisions I had to make, and the variety of software tools I wound up employing along the way. I could have just used iTunes for the entire process. But in the end, I wanted to avoid locking myself into their proprietary file formats and software. (I did come away with a renewed respect for how hard Apple has worked to make their digital music experience seamless and easy, and for just how many decisions Apple’s software makes on your behalf.)

Here’s the workflow I used:

The first big decision I had to make was what file format I wanted to store my digital music in. I’ve got tons of hard drive space. I want high quality. I want open formats. I want to be able to easily transcode my music to other formats as needed in the future. And I never want to rip 200 CDs again. These criteria eliminated “lossy” formats such as MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis, which achieve high compression factors by throwing away audio information. In the end, I was left with “lossless” file formats such as FLAC and Apple Lossless, both of which create bit-for-bit perfect (or, “lossless”) copies of the original digital information on the CDs. Choosing between FLAC and Apple Lossless was actually pretty easy; FLAC is open source and Apple Lossless is not. The fact that the Squeezebox can easily play FLAC files without needing to reconvert them was an extra bonus. FLAC it would be.

Now, how would I got about ripping 200 CDs without driving myself crazy? After a bit of investigation on the SlimDevices wiki, I identified the Exact Audio Copy as the CD ripping software of choice. It’s a free, ultra-high-quality program for extracting music from CDs without errors. It even handles scratched CDs (although slowly). While setup involved setting lots of wierd settings I didn’t fully understand, I just followed the directions on the SlimDevices wiki and pretty soon I was up and running. I particularly appreciated the ability of EAC to automatically access the FreeDB database of CD metadata and automatically tag each track with correct information.

Most CDs took about 7-8 minutes to rip; scratched CDs took longer as EAC read and re-read them to correct the errors caused by the scratches. A few tracks couldn’t be read at all. (I’m going to have to go back and rip them with less paranoid error correction; a few audio glitches may result.)

Once I’d digitized my CDs, I used a few additional programs to further enhance my new digital music library.

• Foobar2000 helped me set correct “ReplayGain” metadata on each file so that tracks would play at a consistent relative volume.
• Album Art Aggregator helped me download cover art for my albums.
• Mp3Tag helped me correct tag information on my tracks.

All of these are great freeware programs — big thanks to their authors for creating such useful and easy-to-use tools — and giving them away to the world!

The icing on the cake, however, turned out to be a piece of software called MusicIP Mixer. It does some sort of patented acoustic analysis on your music library, and then it can build playlists of songs that it thinks sound similar.  It can shove those playlists over to iTunes or your Squeezebox.  And thanks to the handy MusicMagic plugin for Squeezebox, you can automatically build MusicIP playlists right from the Squeezebox remote control.

What I’ve really loved about MusicIP is that it lets me take a not-quite-random walk through the far corners of my music collection.  Instead of total, jarring randomness, I can pick a “seed” song, artist or album, and then the MusicIP system generates a not-quite-so-random playlist that “sounds like” my seed song.  Smooth.

The Squeezebox hardware is a really nicely engineered unit with a high quality display and really good electronics.  But most of the real magic happens in a piece of software running on my PC called SlimServer.  And even better, it’s open-source. That means that there’s a strong community of add-on developers, a reasonably transparent process for reporting bugs, and nightly builds with the latest features.

I suspect that SlimDevices has managed to get away with under-resourcing their software development department a bit, and the open-source community has taken up a good chunk of the slack. But not quite all.  What’s cool is that SlimDevices have incorporated a lot of community-built functionality into SlimServer along the way. What’s less cool is that they haven’t really managed to build a simple, fast, responsive user interface on top of all that power.  Hire a couple more UI guys, y’all!

All in all, though, I’ve been really delighted.  I’m not a “nerd toy” kinda guy, but this a pretty great toy for this music-loving nerd.

I ordered a 500GB external hard drive and a Squeezebox to wirelessly connect my digital music up to my stereo.  The drive will run off Molly’s existing desktop computer in the office/guest room.  But we’ll be able to command the stereo with the Squeezebox’s little remote control — or by hitting its web interface from our laptops.

That should be pretty cool.

I’m sure that hours of enjoyable CD ripping and tagging lie ahead. My next dilemma: FLAC vs VBR MP3.  I think it’ll probably be FLAC — I’ve got the gigabytes to spare and I don’t ever want to re-rip my CDs as formats change.

Possibly in the future: a Kloss Model Two micro-stereo system to replace my bulky pile of mostly-low-end components. But that will have to wait for my bank balance to recover.

No iPod for me, though.  I’m a loyal NPR listener on the bus.