by SimonB » Tue Jan 15, 2008 9:05 am
I am a huge fan of both MM and the Squeezebox. I use MM in rooms with computers in them but the Squeezebox is just perfect for kitchens / bedrooms etc where you don't want a PC.
For pure ease of use the Squeezebox can't be beaten (imho) and MM could learn one or two things there, not least its use of a remote control (which is a bugbear of mine because I use MM on a living-room media PC).
Squeezeboxes can stream FLAC MP3 WMA and AAC, and quality is excellent... not just computer-guy excellent - proper hi-fi buff excellent. The display is great and readable across a room, you can synchronise more than one in adjacent rooms, they run news tickers, you can customise the tree structure (rather like magicnodes) and they have phono and digital outputs so you can plug them into a proper hi-fi and decent speakers (and then chuck away your CD player). Rather like MM there is an army of people coming up with interesting stuff you can do with them including (and this one really sold it to my wife:^) one that enables it to download "listen again" playlists from the BBC so that you can listen to anything that has been on BBC internet radio in the past week at the press of a couple of buttons - a script to do that on MM would be lovely!
Basically if you have a computer and want to listen to music anywhere other than on a computer or via a CD player in the living room, then get a Squeezebox. The combination of having a main library ripped into FLAC and MM able to sync with iPods and other portable players (my sons have a Creative Zen and a new iPod nano between them and both work beautifully) while transcoding on the fly is just heaven and was the main reason for me going for MM in the first place. I only need to keep one (lossless) copy of any song on the server as the only copies of lossy compressed songs are held on portable devices and can be discarded if no longer needed and recreated if necessary.
More integration of MM and Slimserver wouod be nice but it doesn't seem to be that important. My experience so far is I have a deciated server running slimserver (to serve the Squeezebox) with the library ripped in FLAC (I use wires but if you want to run a Squeezebox wirelessly using FLAC you might struggle over longer ranges without a big aerial - although I 'think' you can force it to stream in a more compressed format). One tip is you need to tell Slimserver to keep its playlists (stored as M3U) in a separate folder (i.e. if your music is in ..\media\music then keep your slimserver playlists in ..\media\slimserver playlists\ otherwise I find MM wants to import the playlists all the time. That's not particularly a problem but if your slimserver playlists include radio stations, you will fill your MM library with messy-looking urls and I have found MM is not that clever at picking up interent radio statios that slimserver will play. Importing exporting the playlists you want to share is easy.
Given that both MM (Gold) and Slimserver automatically rescan their libraries at regular intervals I find that the library is pretty low-maintenance. I rip using DbPoweramp and let the other two programs just look after themselves. The songs just appear in both the MM library and on the Squeezbox with little or no intervention from me.
Brilliant!
I am a huge fan of both MM and the Squeezebox. I use MM in rooms with computers in them but the Squeezebox is just perfect for kitchens / bedrooms etc where you don't want a PC.
For pure ease of use the Squeezebox can't be beaten (imho) and MM could learn one or two things there, not least its use of a remote control (which is a bugbear of mine because I use MM on a living-room media PC).
Squeezeboxes can stream FLAC MP3 WMA and AAC, and quality is excellent... not just computer-guy excellent - proper hi-fi buff excellent. The display is great and readable across a room, you can synchronise more than one in adjacent rooms, they run news tickers, you can customise the tree structure (rather like magicnodes) and they have phono and digital outputs so you can plug them into a proper hi-fi and decent speakers (and then chuck away your CD player). Rather like MM there is an army of people coming up with interesting stuff you can do with them including (and this one really sold it to my wife:^) one that enables it to download "listen again" playlists from the BBC so that you can listen to anything that has been on BBC internet radio in the past week at the press of a couple of buttons - a script to do that on MM would be lovely!
Basically if you have a computer and want to listen to music anywhere other than on a computer or via a CD player in the living room, then get a Squeezebox. The combination of having a main library ripped into FLAC and MM able to sync with iPods and other portable players (my sons have a Creative Zen and a new iPod nano between them and both work beautifully) while transcoding on the fly is just heaven and was the main reason for me going for MM in the first place. I only need to keep one (lossless) copy of any song on the server as the only copies of lossy compressed songs are held on portable devices and can be discarded if no longer needed and recreated if necessary.
More integration of MM and Slimserver wouod be nice but it doesn't seem to be that important. My experience so far is I have a deciated server running slimserver (to serve the Squeezebox) with the library ripped in FLAC (I use wires but if you want to run a Squeezebox wirelessly using FLAC you might struggle over longer ranges without a big aerial - although I 'think' you can force it to stream in a more compressed format). One tip is you need to tell Slimserver to keep its playlists (stored as M3U) in a separate folder (i.e. if your music is in ..\media\music then keep your slimserver playlists in ..\media\slimserver playlists\ otherwise I find MM wants to import the playlists all the time. That's not particularly a problem but if your slimserver playlists include radio stations, you will fill your MM library with messy-looking urls and I have found MM is not that clever at picking up interent radio statios that slimserver will play. Importing exporting the playlists you want to share is easy.
Given that both MM (Gold) and Slimserver automatically rescan their libraries at regular intervals I find that the library is pretty low-maintenance. I rip using DbPoweramp and let the other two programs just look after themselves. The songs just appear in both the MM library and on the Squeezbox with little or no intervention from me.
Brilliant!