Tags: Entertainment, Technology
A curious user posted a question to Ask Slashdot that I’ve often pondered myself: Multi-Room Wireless Sound System?
The Problem
I’ve got a pretty good size music collection (too big for my 20gb iPod at any rate), and I’ve wanted an easier way to play music throughout my house. While my question isn’t quite what the poster on /. had in mind, here’s basically what I’ve been looking for:
- A centralized music library. I’ve already got this with iTunes and a rsync scheduled task that runs every morning to back it up across a couple different machines in my house.
- Ability to read iTunes ID3 tag information. I spent a considerable amount of time making sure the CD’s that I ripped had up-to-snuff ID3 tag information, and even went through the trouble of running at least half of my collection through MusicBrainz. I want a player that can recognize these ID3v2 tags including such things as CD# for my box sets.
- Easy to use. Ideally, I’d like something so easy to use that anybody can go pick up the remote, find an album or specific song with ease, and just play. Also playlists should be very easy to create/maintain.
- Multi-headed. Meaning that this will be running in multiple rooms and each room should be independant of one another. Also, a very nice feature would be the ability to play the same (read: synchronized) music source in two or more rooms.
The Contenders
I read through all of the responses this question elicited on /. and I came up with a few products that fit the bill:
- Sonos ZonePlayers are simply amazing. These players do everything I can ever imagine wanting to do. Watch the demo and you’ll be drooling too. The downside: way too expensive. The “sale” they’re having now is $1200 for 2 ZonePlayers and 1 remote. That is just more money than I’m willing to spend on something like this - this product is immediately ruled out.
- Roku SoundBridge looks pretty nice. The device itself looks pretty interesting… unique approach to the design of the thing. Unfortunately, I don’t see that this can play in sync with another device on the network. Also, this plays streamed music from an iTunes shared library, but doesn’t have a centralized server to control more than one device. Ultimately, this solution doesn’t seem to be quite what I had in mind - it looks like it is intended as a single-room unit.
- SlimDevices SqueezeBox is a very promising solution. These little boxes satisfy all of my requirements, and the server software they use is even Open Source. I have downloaded and configured SlimServer and played around with their Java player client SoftSqueeze. I’m pretty impressed - the boxes only cost $200 and are available through Amazon.com
The Solution
I’ve decided to try out a SqueezeBox to see if it’ll work for me. It seems to be pretty cost-effective and I can even hack around with the server to get it to suit me perfectly.
Here are a few things that I’ve stumbled across with SqueezeBox that may be of some interest to others:
- SlimServer runs as a service in Windows 2000+. This is really almost a necessity; it also means that I’ll be running SlimServer on my main Windows PC that I use to rip my music and have my master iTunes collection on.
- SlimServer is smart enough to read the iTunes Library XML file, so it knows about every single MP3 and AAC file in my collection. Unfortunately, the players can’t play DRM’d AAC files, so I’ll have to make sure I convert all my AAC’s to MP3’s by burning/ripping them with iTunes.
- SlimServer understands Smart Playlists and makes them available as normal playlists on the SoftSqueeze / SqueezeBox clients. Any iTunes user will tell you how great Smart Playlists are.
- SlimServer supports SSH tunneling and I’ve tested this out at a remote location running SoftSqueeze. Unfortunately, it requires more bandwidth than my cablemodem has so the sound loops every once in a while. There is on-they-fly recompression support to scale back on bandwidth usage, but that seems like a bother for lesser-quality audio.
I just unpacked my SqueezeBox last night and I’m pretty impressed. It took all of 30 seconds to get it up and playing music. When you give power to the device, it enters setup mode. In setup mode, you need to let it know how it should obtain an IP. I have a DHCP server, so I just let it grab an IP from my pool. Then, it searched for my SlimServer. It found it quickly and asked if it was the right one (you can override it by specifying an IP if you wish). After this, I was told to hold down a key to begin. I did so, and it grabbed the latest firmware and updated itself automagically. Already being familiar with the interface (thanks to SoftSqueeze), I was playing some Cowboy Mouth in no time.
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