Squeezebox 3 Out today.

http://www.slimdevices.com/

Looks very nice and now with a linear power supply it may get nearer to true high end performance.

 

According to the website, the external PSU is still a switcher

It says:

 

Can you not put another PSU on it? Is it like a walkman-style power socket?

Just curious really - I'm not interested in getting one.

 

It's a wall-wart PSU. Nothing to stop you buying a linear 5V PSU and plugging it in (checking socket polarity first of course).

 

Hmm...I seem to remember the minimum requirements for Slimserver being lower than those listed on the site now

I do hope not as I have a silent Celeron 700 based system that I'd like to use as the server when I finally get around to sorting everything out (still need some form of NAS storage, and the squeezebox itself).

 

Don't worry Will, I'm using an SB2, but with the same new software the SB3 uses on a 400/mhz with 128Mb RAM and its working fine!

 

Phew

How do you find slimserver runs on such a system?

The system I'll be running it on will have Windows 2000, a Celeron 700 (or Pentium 3 866 if I can get my hands on one off a mate, which seems likely at the moment) and 512MB of memory, easily matching the system specs for previous versions of slimserver, but I do wonder how it will cope given I have around 7000 tracks (mostly ripped ogg vorbis, some mp3/wma, and quite a lot of ripped FLACs) which would make for a lot of playlists.

A lot of the people on the slimdevices forum seem to be using quite powerful systems for their servers, relative to the spec I intend to use, surely for good reason? I've gone with an older and slower PC as its small form factor so will take up very little space (so I can have it in a cupboard out the way), and its power consumption is very low (75w max) and is completely silent too. I just hope I made a good choice!

 

Mine seems to run fine. My main computer is a mini-itx one which although is quoted as 1Ghz, its more like 600Mhz and that serves the squeezebox and doubles up as a PVR.

Most people have really powerful computers and then complain about it being too slow which I think may be because they expect too much due to the computer. As I use a slower computer I don't expect it to be as quick, but I'm very happy with it.

They say if you are planning on having lots of squeezebox's you need lots of RAM, but 512Mb should be more than enough (its all I have)

Andrew

p.s. keep an eye on the trade adverts next week, I'm releasing a new product!

 

i run ss 6.2 on a pII 400 with 300ish meg of ram and xp - i used to use 128 mb ram but that was taking the piss a bit and it didn;t like it much - it ran but thrashed the hdd all the time...
cheers


julian

 

Julian, the thrashing may be SlimServer re-scanning your music library.

I installed 6.2 earlier and it didn't work. For some reason the SlimServer failed to install as a service so when I clicked the tray icon to open the web interface, nothing happened. If this happends to anyone else, there is a fix. Bring up a DOS prompt window, navigate to "C:\Program Files\SlimServer\Server" and run "slim.exe -install". It should work fine after that.

 

no it was using the hdd as virtual memory once i added another 256 meg it was ok.

 

Oh right. Only if you upgrade from SlimServer 6.1 --> 6.2, it will do a re-scan because the database schema has changed.

 

yeah - this was with 5.something and sbox1 which would rescan at the drop of a hat anyway. 6.2 seems pretty good and squeezenetwork is great fun.
new squeezebox 3 LOOKS nice and will appeal to the i-generation i suspect, however does it sound better? that's the question - from what i;ve read - not really.
cheers


julian.

 

Not directly related but have you guys seen or heard this brick

Some bold claims.

" Under some circumstances it can sound better than a $10,000 hi-fi component."

 

Hmmmm. Interesting. Not cheap. Means you have to have the computer fairly close to the hifi though. Great if you can find a silent PC that also looks good enough to be seen in the living room. Sadly there are very few silent PCs and most of the sexy new media centre PCs are nowhere near silent.

 

and the ones that are silent use slimline CD and hard disks which both increases the price dramatically and limits the storage space considerably

 

I've just finished reinstalling SlimServer 6.1.1 on my XP PC and my Squeezebox is now once again pumping out nice tunes, continuous unbroken tunes, the way they were meant to be heard.

SlimServer 6.2 for XP is seriously broken it seems. Best wait for 6.2.1

 

Thats odd, I have 6.2b running on an XP machine without any problems and also on a few NT machines where again it is fine.

There should be a 6.2.1 out in the next few weeks I think, maybe sooner

 

Yeah, I'm getting a few dropouts now that I've installed 6.2, probably about 1 per hour. I may get annoyed enough to re-install the earlier versions later tonight.

Stuart.

 

After much scratching of head and investigation I think I have got to the root of the problem (which incidentally I was able to provoke even with the 6.1.1 server).

What finally cured it was that I moved the firewire cable to my music hard disk well away from the WiFi aerial (they were almost touching). I made sure all the other cables were also well away from the WiFi aerial. It's been playing fine ever since.