* This post is sleep deprived, my apologies for any insanity *
So I finally laid my hands on a Squeezebox. Actually a Squeezebox 2*, and actually two** of them but one of them is dead (shall be taking it to see if John can poke it into submission with test equipment at some point, but currently it’s stone-cold dead. They are getting on in terms of consumer equipment, but I’m not sure why they die and it’s all surface mount teeny tiny components that make me sad).
Anyhow, for those who don’t know, the Squeezebox series is an out of production, limited support item from Logitech – currently they’re still running the servers that mean it’ll not only play local music, but also stream radio too. One day they’ll switch them off, and I’ll be sad-faced. But since I mainly intend to use it for listening to music from our own collection that’s fine.
It delights me because it has a vacuum fluorescent display which, whilst it’s less efficient and theoretically less long lasting than LCD, is way is prettier. It also plays FLAC and lots of other nice formats. And you can control it from a laptop, android or iOS, or a remote control. It was also designed to do high-quality audio. It’s musical happyness in a small black box.
However, despite being archaic and obsolete and all the commentary I’d seen being ‘oh, Logitech’s UE family is not as versatile but way easier to set up’ I have to say, setting it up was piddlingly easy and fell into the category so far of ‘just working’.
I installed the software on the Linux server – ran through it’s configuration stuff and lo, it was set up. The Squeezebox 2 has the unfortunate fault that it’s wifi card is dead. Apparently, that’s not particularly unusual. Fortunately, it has onboard ethernet and unplugging the card allows it to boot up just fine. One wifiless boot later and plugged in to our network and up it came. It got itself an IP address, found the server, and was ready to play music. Once connected to the amplifier it, well, it just worked. It played music and I tweaked it’s configuration options so it was set up to display the things I wanted.
Err, and that was it.
For an old piece of consumer kit that’s not supported anymore the whole thing was easy and pleasant and it made me very happy.
Thankfully I’m the kind of person who really doesn’t object to running an older linux box as a music server (and in our case as a video server too). Currently, the machine that’s running as our media server won’t run any newer versions of Ubuntu than the one currently on it (it gets various odd problems like no keyboard, or no display, depending on which updated version I try), so it just get security patches and plods along.
I’m sure eventually this will be problematic, but for the moment, it’s a happy solution, and I’m a happy bunny (although I still really, really want an original Slimp3).
*I wish I’d bid more on the squeezebox now, because it went for £14 quid. But I’d bid £10 on some faulty Squeezebox 2s, and won them, so didn’t feel I could spend more on a working Slimp3 which is the original and the one I truly desire. It’s so pretty.
** May have won an auction for a third***
*** By which I mean I have. But I shouldn’t have bid on it. Bad e-bay****.
**** Naughty e-bay, stole a biscuit*****.
***** Who are you to judge me! (points for correct attribution).
