Micks' Musings

This is not a reference to The Who song "mama's got a squeezebox", it is a hands on account of the Logitech Squeezebox Boom and Classic (or Squeezebox 3). The Logitech Squeezebox (originally by Slim Devices but Logitech knows a good thing when it buys it) is a Network Streaming Music Player. There are a few models but I will only be commenting on the Boom and Classic. The Boom has speakers and the Classic connects to your stereo so the two devices have two different purposes. Both can connect to your home network using wireless or Ethernet. You will need to set up a Squeezebox Server or use the online storage option. I have a computer that is on all the time so I installed the server software on that. Both squeezeboxes, once configured with the Network details, found the squeezebox server and can then be configured using the web interface. The Boom is located in the main bedroom and has been set up as an alarm clock, it displays the time when not playing music and i...

I have been using Windows Vista Media Centre as a Home Theatre PC for several years. In that time the Music Library has been polished, album art and track information cleaned up so all albums have the correct information associated with them and nothing shows up as unknown in the artist view. I can tolerate some things, such as podcasts , without album names. With Windows 7 this was not the case. After adding the music folders to the Music library there were 74 tracks listed as unknown. This brings us to the first recommendation - if you can you should create a readonly network share for your music so that Windows Media Player cannot change anything. If Windows Media Player does not like your tags it can end up removing them - I ended up with over a thousand tracks with the carefully crafted album information removed. Luckily I had a backup (and had not overwritten it). This was probably caused by the lookup of album information that Windows Media Player does. I have turned off every...