Delivering audio

By Mark Gibbs, Network World, 04/05/07

In the last two weeks we've cleaned up our MP3 collection, played with Wi-Fi, looked at the annoyingly high radio frequency attenuation properties of our walls, and solved our connectivity problems using HomePlug (aka Ethernet over powerline). (See "Organizing audio," and "Connecting audio," for all the details.)

In "Organizing audio" we noted that "the organized part of our collection has grown to more than 100GB: 1,933 albums with a total of 14,215 songs by 1,075 artists." Reader Kevin Cogan wrote to ask: "Have you ever been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder?"

Following "Connecting audio" we got another note from reader George Grenley. He pointed out there are two factors that determine why some RF goes farther than others: "First, the wire-mesh Faraday cage you have is not ideal; its screen is not solid metal and the wire has resistance. Thus, fields get through, and longer wavelengths will get through better than shorter wavelengths."

This week we want to tell you about how we solved Mrs. Gearhead's request that we get rid of the CDs with "some kind of digital thing." The solution is the Squeezebox from Slim Devices, which lets us deliver music to the kitchen via our home network.

The Squeezebox is 7.6 inches wide by 3.7 inches high by 3.1 inches deep; supports 802.11g wireless; and has a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port, a mini-jack for headphones, digital optical and coax outputs, and analog audio (RCA) stereo outputs.

The device's user interface has a pleasant green fluorescent display and is controlled by a remote that covers the usual playback functions, a variety of specialized functions (search, favorites and so on) and a telephone-style keypad (numbers and letters) so you can enter search terms.

The Squeezebox can stream music from the company's free, open source, streaming server called Slimserver or from Internet radio stations broadcasting in MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Windows Media Audio formats. Stations that support other formats can be listened to through Slimserver plug-ins. Written in Perl and running on Windows, OS X and Linux, the Slimserver is an excellent piece of software engineering.