Pre-purchase questions

[mp3guy]

Hi. I'm thinking about buying a Squeezebox to replace a Roku Soundbridge which I am thinking about returning. One complaint I have with the Roku is my weak wireless signal which results in dropouts. I realize that many factors beyond the wireless capabilities of the unit itself have an effect on signal strength, but all other things being equal, am I likely to see any better signal strength with the Squeezebox?

Thanks.

[smc2911]

Unlikely. Signal strength is a function of your router/access point and the surrounding conditions (walls, other signals, etc) rather than the receiving unit (Roku or Squeezebox).

[oreillymj]

You might find that the extra memory in the Squeezebox is enough to avoid audio dropouts if your wireless signal is weak.
The SB has 64Mb of RAM, of which 32Mb is used for buffering audio data.
The Roku has 16Mb in total according to the spec sheet.

However your money might be better spent on an wireless access point to boost the signal on your network.

[radish]

And of course the SB does 802.11g not just b like the Roku. Given a particular signal strength I'd expect a g client to have more bandwidth.

[mp3guy]

Thanks everyone. I'll take it all under advisement.

[blah509]

or a cantenna (http://www.cantenna.com/)

g

[Ross L]

Sometimes a cheap/easy way to improve a wireless network is to simply replace the router. This is especially true if you don't already own a MIMO router. The WPN824 increased wireless range beyond what I expected...

Try to avoid wireless repeaters, they are generally unimpressive. Adding a wireless access point is a great way to improve wireless signal, they can be a little tricky to setup at first, and of course they do require that you run an ethernet cable to them, but they WILL improve your wireless performance.

[mp3guy]

OK. So after some research, I decided to take the plunge and try a Squeezebox. Still may need a wireless bridge or new router, but maybe not. Anyway, the positives seemed to outweigh the negatives. Can't wait to check it out. Anything I should do before it arrives? Convert my WMA lossless files to FLAC?

[funkstar]

If you want to convert your files then thats up to you, but Slimserver is quite happy with transcoding them on the fly to stream tot the SB.

[JJZolx]

OK. So after some research, I decided to take the plunge and try a Squeezebox. Still may need a wireless bridge or new router, but maybe not. Anyway, the positives seemed to outweigh the negatives. Can't wait to check it out. Anything I should do before it arrives? Convert my WMA lossless files to FLAC?

You don't really have to, but Flac is a better fit for the Squeezebox since it plays the format natively. Flac streaming will tend to be a bit more robust than the streaming of a lossless format that has to be transcoded and streamed as WAV. By streaming a compressed format you increase both the effective wireless bandwidth and the size of the Squeezebox's buffer.

I'm not that familiar with WMA tagging, but I'd guess that Flac's vorbis tags are more flexible and better supported by SlimServer. Tags like ARTISTSORT, ALBUMSORT, ALBUMARIST, and COMPILATION tags may not have a WMA equivalent (someone correct me if I'm wrong about that). You'll find some or all of those tags handy when it comes to how SlimServer views your library.

Whatever format you decide to use, install SlimServer while you wait. Scan your music library and play around in the web interface to see how SlimServer sees it. You'll probably end up correcting, and/or adding to tags to make SlimServer play nice, so find a good tagging program such as Tag & Rename or Mp3tag and learn to use it. You'll also end up fiddling with a number of SlimServer configuration settings for the same reason.

http://mp3tag.de/en/