Saturday, March 10, 2007
Squeezebox, Softsqueeze, Slimdevices
One of my interests for years has been good sound. Never having thousands of dollars to spend on sound, it has been necessary to do with less than perfection BUT with effort coming close. My latest endeavors have resulted in setting up a Slimserver, free, provided by Slimdevices: http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html.
Since free is important, Slimdevices sells Squeezebox, $300, and Transporter, $2,000, which are very good devices, BUT there exists Softsqueeze, free, http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/, which mimics the preceeding hardware devices. The two hardware devices and the software are clients to a Slimserver, free. Slimserver runs on a host computer and serves up whatever audio you place in your music directory. If you place a shortcut in the music directory Slimserver will also find and host the audio files on a second, third, ... hard. USB, FireWire, internal, CD-ROM, DVD drive. The drives are all found and used by Slimserver via the shortcuts in your music directory. Neat piece of software. Slimserver also serves Internet radio stations via their URLs. At this moment, my ears are hearing an old Jack Benny radio show about a couple of IRS agents who visit Jack.
Slimserver allows the creation of playlists which then serve the desired audio files to your client. It is a truly outstanding piece of software.
Since free is important, Slimdevices sells Squeezebox, $300, and Transporter, $2,000, which are very good devices, BUT there exists Softsqueeze, free, http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/, which mimics the preceeding hardware devices. The two hardware devices and the software are clients to a Slimserver, free. Slimserver runs on a host computer and serves up whatever audio you place in your music directory. If you place a shortcut in the music directory Slimserver will also find and host the audio files on a second, third, ... hard. USB, FireWire, internal, CD-ROM, DVD drive. The drives are all found and used by Slimserver via the shortcuts in your music directory. Neat piece of software. Slimserver also serves Internet radio stations via their URLs. At this moment, my ears are hearing an old Jack Benny radio show about a couple of IRS agents who visit Jack.
Slimserver allows the creation of playlists which then serve the desired audio files to your client. It is a truly outstanding piece of software.
