To make a long story short, I've not been so impressed with a product in a very, very long time! [http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_specs.html This thing is freakin' amazing], and I would recommend it to anybody, high price be damned! It's overpriced, yes, but worth it. Sometimes you just gotta live a little. Ordinarily I'd feel a bit bad that they released the 3d generation version right after I bought the 2d generation one, but apparently there's not any difference other than the looks. (And kudos to them for being so honest as to actually say so right on their web site.) As usual, it's worthwhile to buy better hardware that supports free software properly, and Slim Devices has done quite a good job of that. I'm happy to support them for embodying the very opposite of the greedy, lazy lameness that you find in most "for profit" companies.

Fry's had the [http://www.streamium.com/products/sla5500/ Streamium SLA-5500] on sale for $49.95 a couple months ago and I made the mistake of picking one up. I never got it to work at all, not even with the exact setup that should have fit best (XP, with uPNP turned on, using the same wireless network that the Streamium is sitting on). Maybe it was defective, but it didn't seem like it; it managed to get on my WiFi network, do DHCP and get an address, yet after that remain totally deaf and dumb. It couldn't find the Philips Media Manager server, nor could their diagnostic utility find it. And it only supports WMA and MP3 - yuck to both. It is amazing they could sell a wifi device so cheap. And it does have a nice form factor. But in the end I had to slink back to Fry's and wait 1/2 hour in their stupid returns line while the completely un-empowered minions there kept yelling "password" after every step of the process of everyone in front of me. I might have risked an exchange if it wasn't for this terrible waste of time.

Fry's had the [http://www.streamium.com/products/sla5500/ Streamium SLA-5500] on sale for $49.95 a couple months ago and I made the mistake of picking one up. I never got it to work at all, not even with the exact setup that should have fit best (XP, with uPNP turned on, using the same wireless network that the Streamium is sitting on). Maybe it was defective, but it didn't seem like it; it managed to get on my WiFi network, do DHCP and get an address, yet after that remain totally deaf and dumb. It couldn't find the Philips Media Manager server, nor could their diagnostic utility find it. And it only supports WMA and MP3 - yuck to both. It is amazing they could sell a wifi device so cheap. It's supposed to be uPNP standards compliant, and therefore perhaps not strictly dependent on their own PMM server. And it does have a nice form factor. But in the end I had to slink back to Fry's and wait 1/2 hour in their stupid returns line while the completely un-empowered minions there kept yelling "password" after every step of the process of everyone in front of me. I might have risked an exchange if it wasn't for this terrible waste of time.

A couple years ago (end of 2002 I think) I got a [http://www.mock.com/receiver/ Rio Receiver] and hoped to make it as functional as a SqueezeBox. I still have hope for that, but now I think it might really be best to just make it emulate a SqueezeBox as closely as possible. What I really wanted (and still do, maybe) was to make it simply play an RTP stream containing FLAC encoded audio. The UI was insufficient anyway with their included software (no streaming of any kind - you have to select individual songs or playlists); I'd rather have the server be in complete control of what's next, and remote-control it from a web browser rather than from the little LCD and remote. And I'd like to have it mix that FLAC stream with a secondary channel which could be used for announcements (caller ID, security system warnings, the doorbell, that sort of thing). Doing much more than that is just too taxing for its little slow-poke ARM processor. When I tried to add RTP functionality to [http://www.reza.net/rio/rrr.html Reza's Rio Receiver], it just seemed to push it over the edge - too many threads, and not enough CPU time to get much audio decoding done. (RRR includes an embedded web server though.) The big advantage the Rio Receiver has over all the other network audio players is that it has a little audio amp built in. It doesn't have enough power for your main media-room system but it's just the thing for little auxiliary music systems in the bedroom, kitchen, bathroom etc.

Anyway there just aren't many features that SlimServer doesn't have, that I could want. It's unobtrusive (not requiring me to set up MySQL by hand for example, like so many jukeboxes do), scans the content pretty fast, has most of the jukebox sequencing and organization features that anybody could want, and generally just works. I think I'm going to really like the alarm clock feature. They used such a good DAC for wonderful quality sound, as well as having SPDIF output (not that I have anything to plug it into). The display totally rocks, and it's hackable! In Perl! Even the fonts are hackable! It decodes FLAC right on the SqueezeBox, so that's the obvious choice both for ripping (I was already using FLAC for that) and network streaming.