Streaming Audio Part 3
March 10, 2010
My Squeezebox Duet arrived just before Christmas and during my few days off I set it up. I decided to go all out and purchase a NAS drive to store my music and personal files on, so I had a double system to setup. The NAS is a Synology DS109 and is connected to my broadband router via a CAT5 cable. Setup was straight forward and within in minutes I had found the software for the Squeezebox on the Synology website.
My one hitch was that I needed to upgrade the firmware in the NAS before I could instal the Squeezebox software. Once done I booted up the Squeezebox. The Duet consists (as the name suggests) of two pieces, a hub which connects to your HIFI and delivers the audio, and a remote unit which has an iPod like wheel and a nice colour LCD screen. The hub is connected to the HIFI either via an optical cable or a standard stereo RCA lead, the controller then connects to the hub wirelessly. Once I had inserted my wireless access code into the controller I was setup and ready to go. I had about 10 albums loaded on the Synology and all in all I was playing music in 10 – 15 minutes.
As I said earlier I already have a mysqueezebox.com account and have saved my favourite radio stations in this account, including a few subscription ones. Once I had the my account username and password entered is pulled all the content in seamlessly. My only complaint would be due to my broadband speed there is some lag between me inputting the commands on the remote and the relevant changes happening in my online account. This seemed to be more prevalent if I’m playing something from the online account, but as I said I do suffer pretty slow broadband speeds.
At this stage I’ve transferred all my music to the NAS drive and find myself listening to albums I forgot I had. My wife uses it but tends to use the Internet Radio feature more than the MP3 player. If I had one complaint it would be that browsing my music collection using the small screen on the Duet controller is cumbersome. I’m a causality of iTunes, where I expect to be able to see vast amounts of information on one screen, the Duet is simply too small to browse a large music collection.
I still need to set up my podcast subscriptions…
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