Squeezebox Streaming
Published on May 20, 2010
"CD's are dead, long live the new flesh". Well for some anyway. With MP3s and music streamers becoming increasingly common place I put my money on Logitech. Approximately £90 and a trip to Richer Sounds later I was unpacking a Squeezebox reciever having been impressed by its proper audio connectors, ability to play flac files and attractive price tag when compared to other rivals like Sonos.
With the main aim to save a bit of cash, annonyingly, configuring it on your home network usually requires the Squeezebox controller which costs an extra £150 - The reciever itself has no input buttons apart from a large round one on the front which I think is the reset button. Happily there is some extremely useful Perl based code available to enable configuration without the controller curtesy of Robin Bowes:
Perl code: http://projects.robinbowes.com/Net-UDAP/trac
To make it even simpler it's also been compiled into an exe.
exe: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=57861
The instuctions on Robin Bowes site are pretty comprehensive. Once the Squeezebox is plugged into the network it can be discovered:
Once discovered the squeezebox hardware can be configured for use with the network:
Don't get caught out with the different security settings available depending on your wired / wireless security.
If the router allows it, reserving an IP address for the squeezeserver will avoid confusion during restarts of the network where the various hardware components will grab any address they can - potentially rendering the previous settings useless.
When SqueezeServer (previously SlimServer) has been installed on your music storage device and the reciever has been correctly configured, music can be accessed by hitting the Squeezeserver url via any wifi enabled device. The following are some screen shots on a Nokia 5800 via the Opera browser. Here SqueezeServer has been configured to use the 'Handheld' skin.
No doubt it would look a lot nicer on an iPad!