I Ordered my squeeze box Monday night and selected free ground shipping.
I was surprised to find it in my carport late Wed when I came home from work.
The squeezebox is the size of a digital clock. It even displays time like a clock. Took about 30 minutes to set up and get working on my network. The hardest part was entering the mixed case and numbers wpa network password. Getting that 20 digit sucker entered right was a major PITA. Especially since some letters are upper and others lower. I had never entered it before. I always copy/paste on my laptop.
Squeeze box works as expected. I have music playing now from my pc and I’ve also played the internet radio. I ordered my unit directly from LogiTech. They are running a special with squeezebox and some really nice speakers for $130 off the normal price. Too good a deal to pass up.
Since squeezebox is so small and portable… I plan to move it back and forth between my large home stereo and the speakers I just bought (they will be in my home office).
The only issue is squeezebox doesn’t like my m3u.
I have a main playlist that selects the cd m3u that lives in the music folder
Carole King.m3u contains
D:\music\carole king apestry.m3u
D:\music\carole king\magic.m3u
GOM player plays it fine. Squeezebox doesn’t. darn it. Looks like I have to get ugly. Hard code the entire path for every darn song. That’s going to suck.
It’s worth spending a bit of time messing around with different tweaks to your playlist files. Check out the somewhat spotty m3u file format docs out there and make sure you have everything done perfectly, down to character set and so on.
Try enclosing paths to the child m3u files in quotes, try using relative paths, try using Unix-style paths.
You might hit the lucky pattern that works.
It has been my experience that hardware gadgets support standard software formats 95%, but they often have some weird quirk that kills some really useful feature.
DbPowerAmp is partially to blame. I legally ripped my collection with it. By default it creates very long filenames and album titles based on what it reads from the cd. Normally that’s great. But, not if you have to actually use those 50 to 70 character paths.
One solution is to make a separate music folder just for squeezebox. That way I can organize it better and drastically shorten the path name. A code like A001 is all that is needed for the Artist. CD001, CD002 for the albums. I’ve been working with codes in my programming job for over 20 years. A spreadsheet can track the codes and who the artist is. Heck I might even import it into Access and create a couple reports. Some rainy day when I’m bored.
so instead of a 50 to 70 character path. it would be
D:\music\A001\CD001\long file name.flac
D:\music\A001\CD002\long file name.flac
etc. I wouldn’t try to shorten the song name. J want to see that in my squeezebox display.
I can deal with that. Short and sweet. The original files and folders will be left untouched on another drive.
Anyway, that’s my fallback strategy. If the guys over at squeezebox can make my original playlists work that’ll be even better.
If you want to go with your idea, you could use Windows symbolic links (Vista and above). You wouldn’t have to copy files that way, just programatically keep track of links and where they point.
Great idea. I’ll read up on symbolic links. I need to learn the new win7 tricks anyhow. Personal projects are the easiest way to keep my skills up to date. It’s better to learn on my own time instead of at work.
I legally ripped my collection with it. By default it creates very long filenames and album titles based on what it reads from the cd. Normally that’s great. But, not if you have to actually use those 50 to 70 character paths.