SlimDevices Squeezebox

Wound up and ready to play

With the system in place, you can start playing your songs. The Squeezebox features a straightforward search system, allowing you to locate tracks by artist, album title, song name and so on. And you can browse the entire contents of your music folder. The remote's numeric pad uses the same alphabet clusters as a mobile phone keypad, so entering a few characters or even a long album title is easy. The Squeezebox uses that to interrogate your music collection, and displays a lists of items which fit the bill. Again, you just step through the list using the remote's arrow keys.

There are slight pauses as the box talks to the computer via the WLAN, depending on the level of background traffic, but controlling the Squeezebox itself is quick and responsive. Select an album, press Play, and the device will start running through song by song. It maintains a dynamic playlist to which you can add songs by finding them and hitting the Add key. This quickly lets you build up a dinner party playlist, greatest hits selection or whatever. Removing them is trickier, but possible.

The remote also provides the usual pause and track-skip keys, along with shuffle and repeat play order controls, and a handy Now Playing button. You can also set the LED display's brightness and switch it to show a magnified, single-line read-out. You can also control the Squeezebox's output level with a pair of Volume buttons.

Multi-format playback

The Squeezebox plays back MP3 files by preference, but it can cope with iTunes' AAC files (providing they're DRM-free) and Ogg Vorbis tracks, but you'll need extra software to do it. Slim Devices could have done a better job at explaining how this is achieved, and even bundled the appropriate code. But a quick download of Blacktree, Inc.'s iTunes-LAME Encoder - linked from Slim Devices' FAQ - solves the problem. It includes a version of LAME tailored to transcode AAC and QuickTime's .MOV formats to MP3, which the server software streams across to the Squeezebox. There are Windows equivalents for PC-based iTunes users. LAME and Oggtools are enough to do much the same for Ogg Vorbis archives, says Slim Devices.

AAC transcoding is set up to convert to uncompressed AIFF, but transmitting all that data proved too much of a limiting factor on my 802.11b network. AAC-encoded tracks songs sounded choppy, with small sections of each track missing.

The squeezebox keeps time and ignores dropped packets, simply picking up the audio when it returns. So if you lose half a four-minute, say, it won't take more than four minutes before the next song starts.

That said, you do occasionally see the counter get out of sync with the song, a phenomenon that manifests itself as the next track appearing on the display before the previous one has finished.

Shutting down the missus' Citrix client, helped, but configuring the server software to convert to AAC to MP3 rather than AIFF led to a big improvement. Again, this tip comes from Slim Devices' FAQ and a separate download but should have been part of the package.

I didn't experience any of these problems with native MP3s (apart from the track counter synchronisation) and Slim Devices claims its machine works equally well with uncompressed WAV and AIFF files, for those who prefer the true CD quality audio - just make sure you've got plenty of bandwidth.

The sound quality was good, with the caveat that what you get depends on what level of compresssion you use on your archived songs. While an oscilloscope might reveal the addition of noise to the audio signal, my ears couldn't. Like me, you may have to make some adjustment's to the Squeezebox's own Volume, Bass and Treble controls to allow you to set your amplifier's volume to the level you're used to having it at.