Looking to buy a Squeezebox. A Couple of questions

[panalog]

Looking to buy a Squeezebox. All contemporary alternatives look too cheap and probably not that good sounding.

But the squeezebox is pretty old.

In stock form without LNS will I be able to properly listen to most radio stations? I think the SB cannot play https streams, am I wrong? So have many stations moved to https? Is a squeezebox a truly obsolete unit if kept in stock form?

[threshold350]

Looking to buy a Squeezebox. All contemporary alternatives look too cheap and probably not that good sounding.

But the squeezebox is pretty old.

In stock form without LNS will I be able to properly listen to most radio stations? I think the SB cannot play https streams, am I wrong? So have many stations moved to https? Is a squeezebox a truly obsolete unit if kept in stock form?

I have a Touch in stock form and can play all the local radio stations and them some. I remember with mysqueezebox.com you could enter http streams.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[garym]

Looking to buy a Squeezebox. All contemporary alternatives look too cheap and probably not that good sounding.

But the squeezebox is pretty old.

In stock form without LNS will I be able to properly listen to most radio stations? I think the SB cannot play https streams, am I wrong? So have many stations moved to https? Is a squeezebox a truly obsolete unit if kept in stock form?

correct. If only using mysqueezebox.com as server (instead of your own local LMS), your squeezebox players will NOT play https:// radio station links. That said, many radio stations still use http://. In my opinion, to really benefit from squeezeboxes, you should run a local LMS. This is easy to do by running LMS 24/7 on an rPi with piCorePlayer as the operating system.

[w3wilkes]

correct. If only using mysqueezebox.com as server (instead of your own local LMS), your squeezebox players will NOT play https:// radio station links. That said, many radio stations still use http://. In my opinion, to really benefit from squeezeboxes, you should run a local LMS. This is easy to do by running LMS 24/7 on an rPi with piCorePlayer as the operating system.

Agree 100%, for the best Squeezebox experience you should run a local LMS regardless of which official Squeezebox device you use and if you use PiCorePlayer or one of the Squeezelite flavors for your player(s) I think you'll need to run LMS to access mysqueezebox.com.

[Redrum]

In my opinion, to really benefit from squeezeboxes, you should run a local LMS. This is easy to do by running LMS 24/7 on an rPi with piCorePlayer as the operating system.

+1 agree. IMO mysqueezebox.com was intended (more than 1o years ago) to provide an "out of the box" functionality for the devices, with LMS being the suggested approach which would unlock so much more. Since then, development on mysb.com has stopped, but logitech keeps it up and running for legacy purposes. In those 10+ years, allot of things happened on the LMS side (https support, plugins that do just about everything, etc) and nothing further was developed for the mysb.com side.

Still many use mysb.com only because they just want to listen to a few radio stations/services. That's fine if it works for them, but I would not do that today.

OP, if you are considering buying 10 year old devices, and not installing LMS, I would recommend looking elsewhere. There are alot of nice "out of the box" devices out there, sonos, etc.

But if you want a fantastic system with tons of flexibility and the love of this community do as Gary suggests, buy a raspberry pi (if you can find one, otherwise second hand) to serve as a LMS server for your sb device. Install picoreplayer (or other) Or just find a PC or a Mac laying around (I can't be the only one that has alot of unused gear around, right? ) Cheap solution.

My final thought. I still adore the sb devices - I have many - touch, radio, boom...don't love my receivers that much. I really think they were superbly engineered products. The boom and radio sound fantastic for their size.

Jim

[bpa]

In stock form without LNS will I be able to properly listen to most radio stations? I think the SB cannot play https streams, am I wrong? So have many stations moved to https? Is a squeezebox a truly obsolete unit if kept in stock form?

The SB model is not detailed.

Beside not supporting https, SB2/SB3/Boom/Transporter & Classic do NOT support AAC audio stream natively.
Only SB Touch and Radio can play AAC natively.

[panalog]

Thanks for your replies. Very helpful

I’d also like to ask. The categories of the internet radio stations, what defines them ? The squeezebox server ? If I stream for example through my local pi server will the categories (music, sports, talk, etc) be different?

[Paul Webster]

The categorisation is done by the information provider.
For most people this is done in the background by TuneIn - which is the default provider of radio station list/search/browse functionality.
This works for LMS and MySqueezebox.

However, there are other sources which are not available to MySqueezebox - e.g. the RadioNet plugin for LMS - that also usually provide categories ("genre" in the case of RadioNet).

You can also create your own set of Favorites which you can put in named folders (which you could consider as categories) - which are then browsable.

Before you buy, you can create an account on MySqueezebox and have a look around.
You can also install LMS on a local machine and you could install a local player to try out things with LMS.

[Redrum]

Before you buy, you can create an account on MySqueezebox and have a look around.
You can also install LMS on a local machine and you could install a local player to try out things with LMS.

Great suggestion. I would encourage you to try LMS. If I can also add, if you use a PC, you can download and try out Squeezelite-X (even available from the microsoft store). SL-X turns your PC into a "player" much like, say a touch or radio. The nice thing is it utilizes the material skin by default**, which is a real nice UI. You can test and play with pretty much the entire sb/LMS experience with LMS and SL-X installed on a machine...for free.

** you may have to enable the material skin plugin in LMS. I really don't know as I always have material plugin installed on my systems. If so, we can help you with that.

Jim