Back in 2000 a couple of guys Sean Adams and Dean Blackketter started a company called\u00a0Slim Devices, Inc in Mountain View.\u00a0 The made these little cute audio boxes that would talk to a back-end music server written in Perl.\u00a0 The boxes first called SIMP3 and then “Squeezebox”, at first had just an ethernet NIC, a power jack and a couple of RCA pin plugs to run audio out to your stereo system.<\/p>\n
The back end server called SlimServer, was a chunk of Perl\u00a0code that would scan your music library, create a database and wait around for a request for the directory and stream an audio file to the Squeezebox player.\u00a0 As the code was open, folks started to hack on it to add plugins and features to the server.\u00a0 \u00a0For instance, Dan Aronson added a plugin to playback music from Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive (etree.org)<\/a>.<\/p>\n To playback music, you could either use an IR remote control to scan through your music library via the Squeezebox display or go to the server’s web interface.\u00a0 \u00a0Slim Devices put some thought into the web UI so it was pretty clean and intuitive.\u00a0 \u00a0The system had some nice features including syncing up multiple players so your whole house can be playing the same thing, very easy search by what you would expect such as genre, artist, album, etc.<\/p>\n In 2006, Logitech bought Slim Devices and the usual story happened.\u00a0 The acquiring company didn’t know what to do with it and ignored it.\u00a0 Logitech did come out with a player or so but it really didn’t last long as they didn’t do much to market the devices so they discontinued the line in 2012.\u00a0 \u00a0Sonos was directly competing with Slim Devices and doing a much better job in marketing to high-end home audio installations and when you think of audio players for rooms, you likely will think of Sonos.<\/p>\n I loved my Squeezebox players and the SlimServer.\u00a0 When my players started to fail, I started to buy new\/old Squeezeboxes on eBay, but they started to fail too. I looked at replacing the system with Sonos.\u00a0 Two things stopped me, they are EXPENSIVE<\/strong> and they can only handle a music library that has less than 65,000 cuts.\u00a0 At this very moment, my SlimServer reports I have\u00a0117,749 tracks, 13,857 albums, 15,885 artists in 468 genres with a total playing time of\u00a08,375 hours or about a year.\u00a0 As Sonos can’t manage something this size, it meant that it isn’t an option.<\/p>\n Fortunately, there seems to be a large Slimserver fan base.\u00a0 Enough that the server itself is still under active community development with nightly builds<\/a>.\u00a0 On the player side of things, there are a number of efforts that will make a Raspberry Pi look like a Squeezebox.\u00a0 Examples are Pi MusicBox<\/a>\u00a0and Max2Play<\/a>.\u00a0 My personal favorite is piCorePlayer<\/a>\u00a0as three isn’t any licensing but you can send them a donation, the package is kept up and has some great features built into the distribution.<\/p>\n As with any of these distributions, you download an IMG file, use something like Etcher<\/a> to write the image to the SD card you are going to use in your Raspberry Pi, plug in the SD card, power up your Raspberry Pi and with a little bit of setup, you have a player that you can toss behind a pair of powered speakers.\u00a0 You would use the Slimserver web interface to tell the player what to playback.\u00a0 This actually works pretty well.\u00a0 But I wanted a bit more.<\/p>\n I found the digital to analog converter in the Raspberry Pi’s a bit lacking as they tend to be a bit noisy and not what I would call “audiophile”.\u00a0 Poking around a bit I found JustBoom’s HAT for the Raspberry Pi<\/a> that has a TI TAS5756M amplifier and DAC chip that can do up to 192KHz and 32 bits.\u00a0 It can do 30 watts per channel which is just fine for the bedroom.\u00a0 If I wanted something with a bit more power, I would get the JustBoom’s DAC HAT without the amplifier and run it into my audio system.<\/p>\n Having a “headless” player without a screen is fine for a speaker system you want to bury and be out of the way, but in my bedroom, I wanted a display that shows cover art, has some nice screensavers like VU meters wiggling to the music, etc.\u00a0 It should turn off or have some dim clock display.\u00a0 \u00a0In fact, the piCorePlayer supports all of that if you hook up a display to your Pi.\u00a0 It integrates very well with the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s 7-inch touch display<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0You really just need one more thing, some container to hold it all together with and be a stand for your nightstand.\u00a0 Most cases to support the Pi and the 7-inch screen are designed for only those devices.\u00a0 If you want to add a HAT, things will not fit.\u00a0 I did find one company called Smarticase that has a case called the “SmartiPi Touch<\/a>” that supports Pi’s with HATs.<\/p>\n So the cost breakdown is:<\/p>\n So for about $230, you can have a pretty fancy audiophile Squeezebox that is going to be supported and being developed.\u00a0 The software is free.\u00a0 If you can go headless and are happy with the Pi’s onboard DAC, you can bring this price down to about $60.<\/p>\n A quick addendum…\u00a0 There is a mail list discussion where users can discuss Squeezebox devices and the Slimserver at\u00a0http:\/\/lists.slimdevices.com\/mailman\/listinfo\/discuss<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in 2000 a couple of guys Sean Adams and Dean Blackketter started a company called\u00a0Slim Devices, Inc in Mountain View.\u00a0 The made these little cute audio boxes that would talk to a back-end music server written in Perl.\u00a0 The boxes first called SIMP3 and then “Squeezebox”, at first had just an ethernet NIC, a … Continue reading “Long Live Slim Device’s Squeezebox 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