Reg Review I have a dream, ladies and gentlemen, of listening to music of my choosing that has been pumped through the ether as if from nowhere. There are no discs to change, no turntables, drives or tape mechanisms to disturb the concentration, just pure audio, accessible on whim and a player.

Compact Disc welcomed us to the world of digital music. Almost two decades later, MP3 realised the potential of compressing music to make possible archiving huge quantities of the stuff. Today's monstrously capacious hard drives allow us to build that archive.

One thing spoils this audio heaven: the need to wire said hard drive to the hi-fi. There have been hi-fi units equipped with hard drives, but nothing beats a personal computer for ripping and managing an audio collection. But most computers, even Apple's don't sit well alongside a living room entertainment system. And who wants to walk over to a PC to set a player app in motion?

What's needed is a way of keeping your music in one place - the computer up in the spare room - but which lets you listen to it from the comfort of a fine leather reading chair in the lounge.

Enter Slim Devices' Squeezebox, a remote music access point that uses the magic of Wi-Fi to enliven your hi-fi, without forcing you to physically merge the worlds of consumer electronics and computing.

The Squeezebox is about the size of a large, 'trade' paperback. At the back sit a set of digital and analog outputs, a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port, a screw-on WLAN antenna and the power jack. There's a 3.5mm headphone jack on the side. Up front, you'll see a large, crisp two-line LED panel, slightly larger than the kind you might see on a DVD or CD player. There are no controls - the Squeezebox is operated by remote.

Get connected

Connecting the Squeezebox to an amplifier is straightforward. And in a real challenge to claims that Wi-Fi isn't easy to use, getting the unit to talk to your WLAN is equally clear-cut.

It really is a doddle. Plug in the power cable, wait the briefest of moments and the Squeezebox takes you through a short series of steps. First, select your WLAN's SSID. If there are several in the vicinity, you use the up- and down-arrow keys on the remote control to find the right one. Press the right-arrow key when you've done so.

Next, tell the device whether the network is secure or not. If it is, you enter the 64-bit or 128-bit WEP encryption key using the remote's numeric pad. I tried the Squeezebox on an open, public network and on my own, rather more tightly tied down home WLAN, and had no trouble getting it to work with either. Having fought with Wi-Fi and WEP before, it was nice to have something wireless work first time.

Moving on, you're subsequently asked whether the device's IP address will be assigned or is static. I choose the former, and the squeezebox promptly requested one from the router.

Finally, you're asked to select the computer on which Slim Devices' open source server code is running. Again, there may be more than one, so use the arrow keys to locate and select the one you want. And that's it.

The light-weight server software (written in Perl, incidentally) has to be pre-installed on the computer holding your music archive, of course, but that's not likely to tax anyone smart enough to rip their CDs. Slim Devices not only supports the various incarnations of Windows, but Linux and Mac OS X, which wins it much praise from this quarter and a big yah-boo-sucks to its Windows-only rivals. You may need to tweak your firewall, of course.

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.

Verdict

With my Music folder copiously filled with classical, rock and spoken word repertoire, and an extensive if eclectic playlist ticking away on the Squeezebox, I settled down with a large glass of Wirra Wirra Church Block to enjoy this realisation of a dream I've had for nigh on 20 years: tens of thousands of songs, all no more than a few remote control button presses away.

Slim Devices' gadget isn't the only one of its kind, and not the first, but it deserves praise for its cross-platform and multi-format support. And it doesn't pretend to be anything but a music system. So there's no attempt to let you view holiday snaps on your TV, or even the suggestion that your 802.11b network will happily cope with full-screen, full-motion video.

The squeezebox was a joy to use, particularlty once the AAC problem had been resolved - a problem that wouldn't have existed had I had the bulk of my music collection in MP3 format. With MP3s, there really was no problem, and I could sit back and enjoy my playlist, or leave it running in the background while I offered my guests drinks.

The one downside - and it's a minor one - is the WLAN support. With a newly installed 802.11g network, it's a shame to have to drop down to 802.11b for the Squeezebox. Roll on the higher specced version, I say. And hopefully a more comprehensive set of instructions and bundled software while Squeezebox is at it. Having to download code makes for a more up-to-date install, but it's not entirely consumer-friendly. ®

Visit The Reg's Review Channel for more hardware coverage.