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Squeezebox Touch £139.99 at Amazon

Mines arrived and in use. Sound is great!!

Need to organise the various places I have files on the laptop, NAS and USB HDD. I've read somewhere that it will run just from a NAS, but it appears the Squeezebox server needs to be running on the laptop so that needs to be on (which it usually is, but I'd rather it just found the Twonky Media server on the NAS on the network)
 
Tony L said:
Why? My logic was that I'd be able to listen to radio regardless of whether the server (actually my laptop) was up and running or not. What is the advantage of running it on the server rather than on the Touch?
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Adrian's the best guy to tell you the trade offs between the two ways of running his BBC plugins, but one of them is that only one of the ways is visible to iPeng .. Server side plugins can be automatically updated too iirc.
 
Tony L said:
PS In hindsight I should have started off just using the SB Touch with it's little plastic remote control, it's actually rather nice, simple and intuitive compared to the iPhone remotes!
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If you like the handset, you can buy the Duet handset which is quite nice and includes a small colour screen:

 
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It' horrible to use having to scroll round to input band names like it was a dymo. I much prefer my iPad as a controller.
 
I'm not saying I prefer the bundled remote, just that I'd probably not have over-thought the server side configuration to the same extent and kind of got lost in the process. The bundled remote works pretty well though as you can at least jump about a bit with the numeric keypad rather than have to scroll for hours, and the screen-magnification whilst in use is a nice touch. I'm sure I'll grow to love the iPeng.
 
IPeng can scroll through hundreds of albums as fast as you can move your finger - just look over to the right of the screen, you'll see a vertical alphabet: slide your finger up and down it and you can go right through your collection very quickly. IPeng on an iPad is even better.
 
I ordered one of these thinking I could use it as a tuner and spotify premium. I don't have any music on any kind of pc. It does do those things right?
 
johnhunt said:
I ordered one of these thinking I could use it as a tuner and spotify premium. I don't have any music on any kind of pc. It does do those things right?
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It certainly does radio, and very well indeed (it's well worth the cash for this alone IMO), though I haven't figured out if Spotify needs a local server or not. I think I'll bite the bullet and upgrade to Spotify Premium and find out... though not until tomorrow as tonight is Bowie night on BBC 4, so I'm going to watch that!

PS After some initial frustration in understanding what was actually a pretty simple setup I'm liking this thing now, and iPeng is also very good indeed.
 
And remember that if you stump up a few bob for the Playback inapp purchase for iPeng, your iPhone becomes a player .. Add a modest speaker dock and you've a bedside radio/kitchen music system/garden streamer .. Or buy another Touch and make a second system and listen to your music wherever you happen to be in your house...Its interesting how you find yourself listening to quite different music in different bits of your house or at different times
 
Tony L said:
The above option is bugged to f***! I've just wasted about three hours trying to figure out why my iTunes installation had gone utterly mental for no apparent reason. It was self-starting itself and asking numerous times for a password at a 'Sign In To Use This Computer for Automatic Downloads" which it appeared then to ignore until iTunes crashed - it crashed every time I attempted to get to the settings or into the store too, which threw me off course for a while. After a huge amount of time-wasting (enabling the root account, creating a test user account, farting about deleting preference files in my account from the root account, reinstalling iTunes etc etc etc) I noticed there was a Pearl script process grabbing a lot of system resource. I couldn't figure out what on earth would be using Pearl, though eventually twigged that it had to be Squeezebox server (that I'd actually forgotten was auto-running as my SB Touch is yet to arrive). Anyway it was certainly that process to blame, as killing it fixed the problem, plus resetting the 'Extract iTunes Artwork (experimental)' option seems to have stopped SB Server attacking iTunes. Bottom line: don't ever select that option, it's worse than broken and behaves more like a virus!
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Thanks! This was a nuisance here and frankly driving me a little mad! Because of this I always had itunes running.
Another tip let the mac do the decoding of files and not the SBS. The result is much better sound quality.
 
I think he means use SBS to stream via a proper pc rather than run the 'light' version of SBS on the Touch itself.

If you connect say a usb stick full of MP3 files to the SBT directly you will force it to perform the decoding internally.

I understand the logic behind this argument but I'm not convinced that the SBT is sufficiently underpowered to be unduly bothered by this extra load, certainly not to the extent that there is any audible effect.
It is basically a tiny Linux computer with a 550mhz processor and 256mb of ram dedicated to audio.
A decade ago, people were running full function PCs with such processing horsepower and happily playing their MP3 files, so I think its a non-issue.
 
Ok, I'm doing that for the music library, it's only the radio which is on the SBT via MySqueezebox.com. Logitech Media Server is running on my MacBook and accesses the iTunes library.
 
Tony L said:
Sorry, I don't quite follow, could you expand on that a bit?
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From another Thread.


"I was also quite surprised at how much of a difference the settings can make. In Logitech Media Server under advanced settings, file types I tried to switch AIFF from off to native. The difference was huge! Whit it on native it sounds like everything has a slight haze, on off it sounds right. ;)
Also the hardware is quite nice and the screen works surprisingly good."
 
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