Logitech Squeezebox Wi-Fi Internet Radio and Wireless Music Player

The Squeezebox is probably one of the best overall tech/audio purchases Ive made. Combines both of my favorite hobbies, PCs and High Fidelity audio into an easy to use and access system. The key here is without sacrificing sound quality which is hard to find in other systems. The sound quality from the Squeezebox with its Burr Brown DACs is slightly better than my normal CD player. Personally I cant tell a difference between the Squeezebox with properly recorded flac files versus Onkyo/Marantz players. I would say on par with mid end $300 CD players. It is so convenient and enjoyable to have your entire collection at a press of a button and not have to swap out discs. When you get bored of cycling through your collection the Squeezebox also has streaming radio which I didnt care for at first but something I use now on a daily basis, my favorite being the UK station Absolute Radio. The remote control is pretty basic, UI is easy to understand and well thought out. Not at all intimidating for first time users and with a little bit of knowledge is easy to setup and connect to your network. One of my favorite features is using a cell phone, in my case a Sony Ericsson W995 to control the Squeezebox server. With any mobile device with WiFi you can just go to [...] and access your entire music library and control everything from playback to volume. FWIW I chose the Classic over the Duet for the larger display and cheaper price. I knew beforehand that I was going to use a mobile device to access the server so I didnt really have a use for the Duet control, as cool as it looks. All in all the Squeezebox is one of the best additions Ive added to my HiFi system. All music lovers should grab one immediately, you wont regret it!

Pro: Good internal DAC
Con: No DLNA/UPNP support. Proprietary backend server software.

Painful setup on a ARM plug computer/server.

I already have a Mediatomb UPNP server storing ripped FLAC files and Video files on a Sheevaplug server. My DirecTV, PS3, Windows 7, iPhone and Linux machines all work fine with it.
Then I bought this for the quality DACs. I assumed without checking that, with all the high praise this product seemed to get, that it would just work. After all with DLNA/UPNP you
just plug into the network, it detects the server and off you go.

It does not support DLNA/UPNP. So you have to go through the process of installing their Squeezebox server. What a chore that was to get that running on the ARMv Sheevaplug even with the help of all the WIKI pages out there.
The server refused to recognize any of the ID3 Tags produced by GRIP on the FLAC files. They all had to be re-saved with new tags so that the Squeezebox server would categorize the files.

Now I have it working, it seems fine. The sound quality seems pretty good. The user interface on the Squeezebox is fast and responsive. I've not had any audio drop outs. It does support FLAC natively (but if UPNP were supported you could have transcoded to uncompressed PCM anyway). The Internet streaming works well and the search feature for new stations is useful.

All in the the Squeezebox is a good product. But it needs to have UPNP/DLNA support added. The Squeezebox server backend for Linux is pretty poor.

- Update after 2 months -

I installed the server on Ubuntu 9.10 on an Intel Atom card. This install went much more smoothly using apt.
They have updated the server software and solved some of the issues I was seeing with it.
Some other useful plugins are now available including BBC iplayer support.
The server is written in perl, so is still slow to respond on the web interface.
It is still running ok. Haven't had too many dropouts in the audio. It seems to be a stable product.

I recently purchased two Logitech digital radio products, this item (often referred to now as the Squeezebox Classic) and the Logitech Squeezebox Boom All-in-One Network Music Player / Wi-Fi Internet Radio. After using the Squeezebox Classic for a short period I am just floored by how easy it is to use and with its ability to listen to both worldwide internet radio and my own music collection.

One (slight) negative is that the first experience with the Classic and the other Logitech digital music players, initial setup, is the most difficult. To listen to internet radio, you have to enter a network SSID / key, setup a mysqueezebox account, and enter account information for services like Pandora / Slacker / Live365. To stream your own music library you also have to install Squeezebox Server software on the computer or NAS with the music files. I completed these steps without incident, but I can see where setup would be intimidating for those expecting a "plug-and-play" experience.

Once setup was complete, however, my experience with the Classic has been fantastic. You can listen to thousands of internet radio stations defined by genre, location, or your own search criteria. You can enter custom stations in case you find something not yet cataloged on the Squeezebox site. You can listen to the services noted above, Last FM, Pandora, the BBC, the Amazon CD Store, and others. You can stream your own music. And once you get used to the interface on the player, you can switch between all of these things pretty easily.

Physically, the Squeezebox Classic is small (appr. 7.5" x 3.5" x 3"). The Classic has no speakers and requires an external stereo system or powered speakers; the Classic provides RCA analog outputs and coax or optical digital outputs for this purpose, along with a headphone jack. At one point I was looking for an internet radio which included an iPod interface such as the Denon Networking Client Dock with WiFi for iPod and considered the lack of an iPod dock on the Classic a negative, but now in use the streaming of my music collection to the Classic works so well I have no need to hook my iPod up to my stereo.

Overall, I think that the Squeezebox Classic was a great way to get steaming digital music integrated into my sound system and is one of my beter "tech" purchases ever.

In the late 1980s, while I in college, me and a friend from high school mused about how cool it would be if we could digitize our music collections, put them into a computer, and play them on demand. No more swapping LPs, CDs, or Cassettes.

Digital music players like the Squeezebox fulfill that vision. I have two Squeezeboxes, one in the living room, and one upstairs in the master bedroom. You can synchronize them and fill your home with sound. I have not listened directly to a CD in my house in years.

Additionally, with Internet Radio, the world is yours, not from tinny computer speakers, but from your living room hi-fi system. Groove to SomaFM, chill to TSF Jazz, live from Paris, get the news from the BBC, listen the game from you alma mater even though you moved hundreds of miles away, or even listen to your local AM radio stations after dark.

Ease of use on the Internet Radio feature is phenomenal. When connected to the Logitech mysqueezebox.com service, the service detects your location based on your IP address and automatically populates local stations into the menu.

One caveat: Don't buy Apple's DRM m4p AAC files from iTunes. DRM protected files will not play on Squeezebox. Instead buy non-DRM mp3s from Amazon. They work great with Squeezebox.

Why 4-stars and not 5? Some minor annoyances, and I believe the price is still a high for Squeezebox products compared to alternatives such as Roku SoundBridge M1001. I got my first Squeezebox for sale for $250 several years ago, and the second one was on sale because it was the white model (this was back when black was the cool color, and before Apple had succeed in making white the cool color). If it were possible to give half-star ratings, I would rate 4.5 stars.

Update: I recently started using Squeezebox's ability to connect to my Pandora Internet Radio profile and play my Pandora stations through Logitech's mysqueezebox.com service. This is a great feature, and the fact it works with a four-year old system is awesome investment protection. Pandora sound quality is outstanding. I had to contact Logitech customer support due to a problem with one of my Squeezeboxes and Logitech corrected the problem quickly and professionally. Kudos to Logitech's technical support.

After helping a neighbor buy and set up one of these a few years ago, I've been anxiously awaiting purchasing one myself. For many years, I've been using an Audiotron, which is a digital music player that was great for its time, but it was discontinued years ago, and the Squeezebox offered more features, including access to the excellent Pandora music service.

Adding to the attraction of its many features, it also has a stellar reputation for audio quality and an active support community on the Squeezebox forums. There are many instances where audiophiles are using Squeezebox devices to play lossless music files through high-end equipment; a situation that years ago would have been done through a dedicated and very expensive CD transport. Slim Devices (now purchased by Logitech) even designed the Squeezebox Transporter to cater to that crowd, offering a premium-priced product that was based upon this Squeezebox hardware.

When I had the chance to purchase the Squeezebox for a very good price, I didn't hesitate, and I'm very glad that I made the purchase!

A primary difference between the Audiotron and the Squeezebox is that the latter requires the SqueezeCenter software to be running on a host computer in order to provide anything more than Internet Radio. I wasn't thrilled about the idea of having something like that taking up computer resources, so I used this as an opportunity to purchase the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo 2-Bay (Diskless) Desktop Network Storage RND2000 that also provides the ability to run SqueezeCenter along with hosting the files. Now, I don't need to have a computer running 24/7 and I don't have to deal with a software package running on my primary PC.

The tradeoff is that the ReadyNAS is somewhat underpowered, and the response time of the web interface is a little slower than I'd like. Hopefully, a software update will improve that situation, even if just a little.

The Squeezebox is an audio-only device, so you will not find a video connection on its back panel. Control is in the form of a standard IR remote control and the vacuum flourescent display, which is very good quality. I actually prefer to the use the web interface, even if it's a little on the slow side through the ReadyNAS. I'm looking forward to trying the iPhone app for controlling it. The flexibility that there are so many different ways to control the Squeezebox is a testament to the technical prowess behind the designers of the product.

Even though I'm glad that I don't have to turn on my TV to control the Squeezebox, I have to admit that I'd really like to be able to use an on-screen GUI to navigate my music library, change settings, and see cover art and visualizations while music is playing. Such additions would likely make the player more expensive and out of reach for many people, though.

There are so many capabilities of this device, I haven't looked through them all and experimented with them. Tops among them are iTunes library integration, where it appears that I could access my iTunes playlists for a more seamless and integrated experience.

By far, I get the most use out of the Pandora music service. Pandora is an online service that allows you to specify an artist or a song that you like and it will go out and find similar artists and songs. You can create multiple stations, so that you can listen to music to match your mood, from Johnny Cash Country to 80's rock to relaxing piano music from the likes of Jim Brickman. You can access Pandora on your computer, but nothing beats the convenience being able to pipe that music throughout your house!

Pandora access was the primary reason I wanted a Squeezebox, and I'm very happy with it. The only thing I would like is a way to access "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" ratings more easily from the remote.

The advantage of having a centralized server software program is that you can add more Squeezebox devices and control them from the software and even synchronize them for simultaneous playback if you wish. I bought a used 1st generation Squeezebox and it works great to access my entire music collection as well as Pandora, etc.

Having the Squeezebox allows us to enjoy more music more often. We get more use from the music library we have, and listening to Pandora opens us up to artists and music we may not have heard otherwise. While you can attach an iPod to your stereo system to play your music, it's not the same as having a device dedicated to the task. The sound quality is fantastic, there are more features than most people will know what to do with, and it's a great addition to our entertainment system!

Highly recommended!