Streaming Audio

November 19, 2009

I’m not sure about you but my CD collection once took pride of place beside an expensive looking hifi system. Once I even alphabetically sorted them by artist! However two things occurred simultaneously, my children arrived and to save space and child proof the house I ripped all my CDs to MP3.

The MP3 player has been a revelation in my house, no longer is their an argument over who lost who’s CD, or who put Nick Caves album into Beyonce’s cover. All our music sits nicely on the family PC and we pull what we want onto our personal MP3 players. The over sized, over elaborate hifi system has been replaced with a neat little system that sits on a shelf in the kitchen and beside this sits a docking station for our MP3 players. My wife uses an Ipod nano and I have an Ipod classic. All seems fine but there are times when our Ipods don’t have the tracks that we want, the new CD we bought hasn’t been ripped or the album we bought from itunes hasn’t been copied to one of the Ipods. What we really need is system that will allow us to keep one music collection and access it from around the house.

A few years ago, Logitech bought a small American company called Slimdevices. Slimdevices made a music streamer called the Squeezebox. Since then Logitech have taken the idea and expanded it to 5 seperate products. I purchased a Squeezebox classic from the company before Logitech bought them out, but never really used it much. About 2 years ago we built an extension at home and I brought the unit to the office where it’s now used mainly as an internet radio, but of late some members of staff have begun to add MP3s to our office music collection.

squeezebox-touch-20090902-600

After much legal wrangling over ownership of the squeezebox, an agreement was reached that the company would purchase a replacement for me while I would leave the existing one in situ. So on Thursday, the 12th of November, I set up an account with the suppliers for Ireland and ordered 2 new squeezeboxes. The first, a Squeezebox radio, for display purposes in our showroom, and the second, a squeezebox touch, to be connected to the hifi in my kitchen.

Over the coming weeks I’ll let you know how I get on.

Posted by paul | Filed Under News