Music in the house...

[judith_s]

We are planning to add music to several rooms in our house and wondered what others have decided upon?

There a several audio streamer systems now (Sonos, Roku, etc.), some hand built systems, or just using an extra computer with SongBird or the like. What are others using? What are others recommending? A remote control would be cool but not absolutely necessary.

Comments

[mcl.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm somewhat biased towards the stuff produced by http://www.slimdevices.com/ , but mostly because I was one of the original developers (I think my name is still in the code and a hidden display easter egg somewhere).

The basic premise is that you have the device connected via Ethernet or wireless, and connected to your home stereo system (or speakers, or what-have-you). Your music is stored on a server elsewhere, along with your playlists, lists of streaming audio sites, etc. You serve your music from that computer, and one or multiple devices can use the server simultaneously.

If I remember correctly, the Roku device is basically a rebuild of the Slimdevices hardware. It even uses (when it launched, it relied upon) the Slimdevices server software as the backend. So, for all intents and purposes, they're the same thing.

However, the Slimdevices people are local (they're somewhere up the peninsula a bit...I visited their production facility a while back) (though I think one of the big companies...Logitech? just bought them a month or so ago), and quite friendly. And there's an active developer and user community w/mailing lists for devs, users, etc.

The Slimdevices products are remote-controlled, as well.


All you need to set them up is a network connection (wired or wireless), and some sort of connection to an audio output device (stereo w/speakers, stand-alone amplified speakers, etc.). The important bit is the amplification, since it outputs line-level audio.

As an added bonus, they've been around since around 1999.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Squeezebox rocked my world when it first came out.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

As long as you're not playing Apple DRMed music, I'd echo mcl's suggestion about the Squeezebox. Check the website for their current capabilities, I had a 1st generation, so any transcoding from AAC or MP4 to MP3 had to be done on the server. If you have any iTunes store bought music, you'll need an Airport Express.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I haven't solved this problem yet. I have an Airport Express that ambar gave that runs my primary speakers, but I keep needing to build a netbsd version of raop-play to drive it off of midgard (or throw in the towel and finally migrate to linux). And I haven't tried to solve multi-room speaker systems yet (the Airport solution won't do that, because they bind each set of speakers to a specific source, and there's no way to maintain time synchronization between Airport Expresses.