Squeezeboxes on major sale

[discocarp]

The squeezebox definitely has no problems streaming cd quality audio to multiple players via wireless. I was even doing this via b before I moved my router to g.

 

[kcl]

When I mentioned 'easy' I wasnt looking to skimp on audio quality. The squeezebox streams audio over a network, but in case where the server is in the same rack as the rest of the equipment (and you dont want a keyboard/mouse/monitor), is there something more appropriate to front-end the PC?

Like discocarp, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. The Infrant ReadyNAS that I referred to previously is a stand-alone box without a monitor, keyboard or mouse. You plug in your disks, turn it on (with hotswap disks, not required to be in that order, either), and it just works. You configure and maintain the system via a webpage. It will also email wherever you want when some significant event occurs (moving to/from battery power on a UPS, disk problem, etc.). There are other 'black-box' solutions like this, too.

If you're talking about the software, the SlimServer system that is used is an open source, public supported system. Its written in perl, I believe, and can be installed on practically any system (Mac, PC, or linux/unix).

If its the encoding system, the 'native' format of the Squeezebox is FLAC, which is also an open source with public support (FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Compression, I believe).

If you're wondering about a network player on a PC there is Softsqueeze, a software version of the Squeezebox. This is a Java app that is, once again, an open source with public support.

Does any of this help?

 

[Tj Bassi]

Ken-

Good, options, thanks. Basically I wound up with a few used (but recent hardware) computers with almost a half TB of storage in removable drives. Instead of building a remote PC and accessing it with a squeezebox, I was just asking if there was some way to eliminate the network connection between the SB and PC, or an easier way to turn a keyboardless/monitorless PC into a music server.
Of course, at the current sale price of the squeezebox and all of the nice comments on it from forum members, I should just get one and be done...

T-