Digital Home Thoughts: Squeezebox Gets Pretty

"The good people over at Slim Devices have revved both hardware and software. The new Squeezebox player comes in four colors of varying taste, while the new version of the SlimServer streaming server supports more formats and gets a few other features as well. Taken together, the new hardware and software represent the further maturation of an already solid and very geek-friendly product. The Slim Devices folk have been at this for years now, so if you're not familiar with them it's not because they're some latecomer trying to cash in. In fact, the whole company started as an extension to the open source development community for SlimServer, an open source audio streaming server. The first Squeezebox hardware was, to be polite, hobbyist quality."



The Squeezebox apparently has gotten a lot slicker, and basically looks like it is a commercial quality piece of hardware that supports either wired ($209) or wireless ($289) network connectivity. The Squeezebox itself is a quite simple in that it simply receives an audio stream and instructions about what to put on the display, outputs that audio stream via its analog and digital audio outputs, and passes remote control button presses back to the SlimServer. It is apparently the SlimServer package, which manages the audio library that is the meat of the product. Did anyone try the original Squeezebox?