Squeezebox by Slim Devices

For those that have been paying attention, you may have noticed that the Squeezebox has disappeared off my wishlist. That’s because I finally bought one!

I decided that since we were heading down to Toronto this past weekend, I’d take the opportunity to stop off at Kawartha TV in Peterborough. After contacting Slim Devices to see if there was a retailer available in Canada so I could avoid the crazy shipping and brokerage fees, they told me about Kawartha TV and gave me their web site. I checked it out and then emailed them to see if they had any in stock. They replied that they did so I told them to hang on to one of them for me.

I picked it up Friday night. Total cost after tax was $310.49. The sad part was that despite the fact that I just spent over three hundred bucks on a new toy…I wasn’t able to try it out until at least Sunday!

I had planned to set it up as soon as I got back on Sunday afternoon but alas, it was not to be. The trip home took a lot longer than expected (picking up the dog didn’t go smoothly, I’ll leave it at that) and so by the time we got home and ate something it was time to sit down for the three hour Survivor finale. :)

After the finale I went down to the basement to make the required network connections (basically making the drop in the family room live by plugging it into the switch) and then I finally plugged in my new toy. This was, of course, after installing the slimserver software.

The device came alive! I stepped through the easy setup, basically told it to go out and get itself an IP address from my router and then it called home and found out it was running old software! No worries…a minute later and I’m all up to date, still with no input from me. Very cool! After that it located the computer on my network that was running the slimserver (my mac) and then sat there waiting for me to tell it to do something.

My original plan was to plug it into the TV on an unused input but at first glance it didn’t seem like I had any to spare. I was using one for my VCR, one for my DVD player and one for my satellite receiver. There was an empty one at the front of the TV but I was pretty sure that Amy wouldn’t like the look of wires draped around the TV sticking into the front of it. I contemplated unhooking my computer speakers and plugging them into the headphone jack on the side of the squeezebox but that would have involved a lot of re-routing of wires and it was late by this point. I reluctantly opted to wait until the next day to try it out.

When I powered it down (the nice red power button on the remote) the display changed to showing the current date and time, and it was even counting the seconds as they went by! SWEET!

So…here it is the next day and I’m sitting here listening to music which is pumping through my squeezebox so I must have gotten something set up, right? I did end up moving my computer speakers down to the family room, most likely temporarily, since as you’ll see by the pictures, the setup doesn’t look that good. Those little computer speakers give a pretty good sound though if you ask me.

I can control the squeezebox from either the remote that was included with it, or from a web interface on any computer in my network. Not only can I control what song is playing, but also the volume! Steve is gonna love this thing next time we have a party here! I was chatting with Boris and I think I may open up the appropriate port on my router and forward it to my mac so that I can control the squeezebox from anywhere! Wouldn’t that freak Amy out. ;)

Since I still haven’t figured out how to include pictures in my posts, I’ll just add a link to some pictures in my gallery.