I thought it was about time that I updated this site - been almost a month without me posting anything new so here’s something you might find of interest.
Two years ago I wrote about how the digitizing of music and photos onto our hard drives was removing the visual cues from our homes of what made us, well, us. With all my music on my hard drive there’s no way that someone could sit in the living room and spot an album they have and then spark a conversation for instance. What are we losing in the process of digitization? On the flip side having your music stored digitally can change the way you listen to your tunes, either by freeing up your music around the house through streaming devices or having the ability to create playlists based on what you and don’t like.
So anyway I recently got hold of a Squeezebox from Slimdevices together with a Qnap Network attached hard drive supplied by Ripcaster. The Squeezebox is a beautiful device that allows you to stream your music around your home, with a very intuitive user interface allowing you to browse your entire music collection. The cool thing about the Qnap TS-101 when bought from Ripcaster is that it’s a self contained Linux box which comes preinstalled with Slimserver, the open source server that Squeezebox uses to play your music. What this means is I don’t have to have my Mac on 24/7, I just simply have the harddrive (which I’ve copied all my music to) connected to my network and my music is available all the time.
That in itself is fabulous and works great (the audio quality is fantastic), but the real power is when you sign up to the free Squeezenetwork. This allows you to show RSS feeds on your Squeezebox (if you’re so inclined) and other stuff, but the really cool thing is when you sign up to Pandora. Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project and works like, well, magic! You simply enter a favorite track or artist and Pandora will create a virtual radio station consisting of music that match that musical style. And it works - and I mean really works. So most of the time I now have my Squeezebox streaming tunes from Pandora, all created on the fly based on the songs that I like.
To me this is the true power of digital music and a beautiful use of technology. Now I also have the idea of using something like Chumby to create a visual front end to my album collection which would then control my Squeezebox. I’ll keep you posted.
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Nice, this sounds reeeeaally nice. But I have to admit, I think I’m too fussy about music to let a computer pick it for me. I have shifts in taste that there is no accounting for!
And with so much of my digital life being online 24/7 why not just have a mac on well, 24/7? That’s what I’ll be doing with my Mac mini next week.
I was thinking about getting a NAS drive or something, but with iTunes and iPhoto sharing across a network, the Mac mini will be a multi purpose media centre, as well as web/dev server.
But still, the Squeezebox does have cool green glowy text…
jake / 10/02/2007