Logitech SqueezeBox replacement for under $30

[pippin]

Just for my understanding, is the licensing issues any different than for the current Vortexbox Appliance products which also includes a software player last time I checked ?
At least my Vortexbox installation on a laptop have a software player built-in.

Technically not. But the Vortexbox appliance is a PC, maybe the original manufacturer pays the license fee? The Pi is explicitly being sold as a developer/kit unit only to avoid these kinds if issues, even though it doesn't come with any codecs.

[NFLnut]

Honestly, and I know that I'm risking getting flamed BIG time on this board, but if Logitech is going to pull the plug, I think it's time to abandon or phase out LMS in any "home built" effort! I still think the Squeezebox is THE best music player on the market. It's truly a shame that Logitech IS pulling the plug, but obviously their numbers probably dictate phasing out the hardware. I don't think ANY of us were under the illusion that the SB was setting the world on fire with sales. It was always a niche product. And that all being said .. LMS has just gotten to where it is just WAY TOO SLOW. I run LMS on a quad core i7. And at times, it just crawls .. even hangs for up to a minute or two when I am accessing a large folder. I have actually been looking for an alternative .. but none better yet exists.

Squeezeboxen .. awesome hardware. But the LMS is just getting almost unusable. For me, anyway. If the Sonos had a visual display a la the Squeezebox Classic (which I have), or the Touch (which I was scanning eBay etc for, but guess at these prices I will instead just spend money on a product which has NOT been ruled obsolete), I would have already placed an order. But, I don't really like to have to always grab a tablet or phone in order to see what's playing! I also don't know if it's possible to hook up an external pair of speakers or an amp to the Sonos Play:5 should I choose (honestly, the various Sonos hardware truly confuses the hell out of me!)

I truly feel "dirty" even contemplating Sonos, but they are still actively selling their product. They will have to be in my short-list of future music players. I just found out about Logitech pulling the plug two days ago, thus I missed out on getting an in-stock Touch in September/October when the prices were still reasonable.

[garym]

Honestly, and I know that I'm risking getting flamed BIG time on this board, but if Logitech is going to pull the plug, I think it's time to abandon or phase out LMS in any "home built" effort! I still think the Squeezebox is THE best music player on the market. It's truly a shame that Logitech IS pulling the plug, but obviously their numbers probably dictate phasing out the hardware. I don't think ANY of us were under the illusion that the SB was setting the world on fire with sales. It was always a niche product. And that all being said .. LMS has just gotten to where it is just WAY TOO SLOW. I run LMS on a quad core i7. And at times, it just crawls .. even hangs for up to a minute or two when I am accessing a large folder. I have actually been looking for an alternative .. but none better yet exists.

Squeezeboxen .. awesome hardware. But the LMS is just getting almost unusable. For me, anyway. If the Sonos had a visual display a la the Squeezebox Classic (which I have), or the Touch (which I was scanning eBay etc for, but guess at these prices I will instead just spend money on a product which has NOT been ruled obsolete). I truly feel "dirty" contemplating Sonos, but they are still actively selling their product. They will have to be in my short-list of future music players. I just found out about Logitech pulling the plug two days ago, thus I missed out on getting an in-stock Touch in September/October when the prices were still reasonable.

interesting about the slowness of LMS. Not at all trying to flame you, but as an additional data point, I can say that I use LMS 7.7.2 on a win7 quad core i7 machine (as well as my slower Vortexbox machines). I don't notice any slowness at all. Browsing my library is very snappy and certainly no hanging or crawling. And I have a library of mostly FLACs a bit over 70,000 files. Most with artwork. I do note that you mention "accessing a large folder". I use almost entirely browsing by Artist, Album, or Genre. My files all have good tags. I rarely use "browse music folder". LMS is not really designed to use Browse Music Folder as a way of accessing music. Its internal database is based on tags, etc. So using BMF could be the cause of the hanging you see.

[NFLnut]

I rarely use "browse music folder". LMS is not really designed to use Browse Music Folder as a way of accessing music. Its internal database is based on tags, etc. So using BMF could be the cause of the hanging you see.

That may be. The way I have my music categorized is by folders. I am an old radio guy. I was raised on, and worked in top-40/pop/rock radio in the (60s) 70s 80s. A few of my "hits" folders have several thousand FLACs in them. I often will cue up one of those folders for random play. I generally am not a single- "entire album" listener. My tags are all pretty much cleaned up. I know that I am probably more extreme in how I utilize LMS, and I may have the same slowness with any other platform. I was more stating that FOR ME, LMS is more usable than any of the other music servers, but is far from perfect and has seemed to get slower with almost every release after about 7.1.

[garym]

That may be. The way I have my music categorized is by folders. I am an old radio guy. I was raised on, and worked in top-40/pop/rock radio in the (60s) 70s 80s. A few of my "hits" folders have several thousand FLACs in them. I often will cue up one of those folders for random play. I generally am not a single- "entire album" listener. My tags are all pretty much cleaned up. I know that I am probably more extreme in how I utilize LMS, and I may have the same slowness with any other platform. I was more stating that FOR ME, LMS is more usable than any of the other music servers, but is far from perfect and has seemed to get slower with almost every release after about 7.1.

you might want to look at erland's dynamic playlist plugin. I often listen to random play as well from subsets containing thousands of files (sometimes tens of thousands). But with dynamic playlists combined with SQL playlists, I can create random mixes from these large sources but only 10 songs at a time are added to the playlist (and this can keep going on forever). This way the SB or LMS doesn't choke with massive playlists (which can also be a problem you might be seeing with LMS). And I agree, LMS is good for many things, but it could always be better!

[aubuti]

That may be. The way I have my music categorized is by folders. I am an old radio guy. I was raised on, and worked in top-40/pop/rock radio in the (60s) 70s 80s. A few of my "hits" folders have several thousand FLACs in them. I often will cue up one of those folders for random play. I generally am not a single- "entire album" listener. My tags are all pretty much cleaned up. I know that I am probably more extreme in how I utilize LMS, and I may have the same slowness with any other platform. I was more stating that FOR ME, LMS is more usable than any of the other music servers, but is far from perfect and has seemed to get slower with almost every release after about 7.1.

My library isn't large (only ~7500 tracks), but it runs plenty snappy on a lowly Atom-based computer with slow hard disk. The performance of most OSs, and whatever software is running on them, tends to degrade when they need to deal with folders containing thousands of files. There are ways of getting LMS to bend to your preferred usage pattern. As garym mentioned, there is the Dynamic Playlists plugin. And presuming that there is some common thread FOR YOU that puts those 1000s of tracks in a particular folder, you could also gain by (a) using that common characteristic in a genre tag, and (b) splitting up the files into multiple sub-folders (say, based on the first letter of the artists name or track title). That way you can still easily play them randomly based on the new genre you establish -- and multiple genres are easy in LMS.

And actually the Sonos hardware isn't too hard to grok. Very roughly speaking:
Play:3 -- like the SB Radio, but with no display or controls
Play:5 -- like Play:5, but bigger
Connect -- like the SB Duet Receiver
Connect:Amp -- like the SB Duet Receiver mated with an amplifier (some 3rd party actually made such a beast for a while)
Bridge -- only need it to establish the Sonos proprietary network if for some reason you cannot connect at least one of the players listed above to your router via _wired_ connection
Control -- like the SB Duet Controller, but more like a smartphone in terms of screen real estate. The _only_ Sonos product that will show what you're playing, though of course they do support 3rd party smartphones, tablets, iPods, etc.

[garym]

-- and multiple genres are easy in LMS.

Yes, I use multiple genres in some file tags. And easy to add multiple genres in batch ways using mp3tag. (note, in the genre field use double back slashes to separate genres, enter something like:
Rock\\Holiday

This will then show up in your flac files as:

Genre: Rock
Genre: Holiday

[garym]

And actually the Sonos hardware isn't too hard to grok. Very roughly speaking:
Play:3 -- like the SB Radio, but with no display or controls
Play:5 -- like Play:5, but bigger
Connect -- like the SB Duet Receiver
Connect:Amp -- like the SB Duet Receiver mated with an amplifier (some 3rd party actually made such a beast for a while)
Bridge -- only need it to establish the Sonos proprietary network if for some reason you cannot connect at least one of the players listed above to your router via _wired_ connection
Control -- like the SB Duet Controller, but more like a smartphone in terms of screen real estate. The _only_ Sonos product that will show what you're playing, though of course they do support 3rd party smartphones, tablets, iPods, etc.

interesting that there is nothing that seems to function as a bedside radio. With all the alarm complaints that SB gets, I can understand this. But it seems like it would be nice to have a bedside player that one can listen to via speaker or headphone AND IMPORTANTLY control without fumbling for a smart phone remote in the middle of the night.

[aubuti]

interesting that there is nothing that seems to function as a bedside radio. With all the alarm complaints that SB gets, I can understand this. But it seems like it would be nice to have a bedside player that one can listen to via speaker or headphone AND IMPORTANTLY control without fumbling for a smart phone remote in the middle of the night.

In their promotional photos they hint at the Play:5 and especially the Play:3 as bedside devices, but personally I think it makes no sense at all not to have any hardware controls at all on a tabletop player (ie, one with a built-in amp and speaker). The middle of the night or first thing in the morning are the worst cases, but even having to grab a remote to operate a device that may typically be only arm's length away seems dumb.

[Wirrunna]

The PogoPlug I'm using has a Marvell Kirkwood 1.2GHz (ARM) processor and 256 GB memory. You could run LMS on it if you wanted. I'm using squeezeplug as a base OS so this would be very easy to do.

I never recommend running LMS on a unit like this becasue of problems with rebuilding a your libary, WMA playback, Spotify etc. Your much better off haveing a VortexBox and use the VAMP as a player only.

As for wifi this would be required to make this a true replacement for the SqueezeBox. This unit does not have wifi so you will need to use something like a HomePlug adapter for now. I consider HomePlug more reliable then wifi but that is a discussion for another thread! I have a small wifi dongle that cost $8. I will be writing more articles about the VAMP and I may write one on wifi enabling it.

I'm sorry the pogo is not available in Europe. Maybe I'll find a cheap way to ship them there! I would love to base the VAMP off something that is more widely available worldwide. I looked at the Pi but you need a case for it. That can cost almost as much as the unit for a nice one. Also only one USB port. The Pogo has 4 usb ports and comes in a nice case already for under $20!

This is a bright start to the new year!
I will be watching the development of this VAMP with great interest.

[Triode]

Can't match $30, but another alternative is the CuBox: http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox

I got one this morning and the sock firmware will run squeezelite and supports usb audio and async hifi dacs. It's about 3 times the price of the Pi, but its doing what I envisaged Squeezelite could do on an arm like device. Plus there's an hdmi display and ir port which could be made to do something useful too...

Anyway if anyone wants an alternative to the SBT with async usb support which supports mmap alsa (which gets the best our of squeezelite) then this looks an option for a roll your own squeezelite box. As with the Pi its really targeted at developers rather than end users so is really only showing what a diy solution could give.

Note for people who followed EDO on the SBT forum: it needs an external high speed hub if you have an async usb audio class 1 dac. [looks like the "missing" silicon in the Pi is common on embedded arms - they don't support full speed async dacs correctly without a hub]

[bpa]

An alternative is cubieboard ( http://www.cubieboard.org and can bought from here http://www.aliexpress.com/store/all-...ts/511685.html ) but unlike cubox no nice enclosure but much cheaper US$49 and has 1Gb RAM and a SATA disk interface.

I got one before Christmas but haven't had much time to play around with it except to install Linaro. Unfortunately the development community is very small so porting Raspberry Pi solutions to ARM/Linux issuesseems to be common.

Cubieboard is based on Allwinner A10 chip which means any software working on cubieboard will also run on the nicer packed A10 based product such as http://www.ebay.ie/itm/Android-4-0-1...#ht_3892wt_950

[JackOfAll]

Can't match $30, but another alternative is the CuBox: http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox

Yes, I ordered one of those too, probably for the same reasons as you after the issues running a UAC2 DAC on the Pi. Not got mine yet. (But I don't expect to have any issues with it, already knowing that other people are using the WaveIO USB->I2S board, Class 2 async, no issues.)

[smiggs]

[My original target device was a Raspberry Pi, I'm hoping its usb driver can get fixed to make this a reality]

Have you tried the method mentioned at http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/vi...p?f=38&t=20866 or am I missing something?

[Triode]

Have you tried the method mentioned at http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/vi...p?f=38&t=20866 or am I missing something?

Unfortunately that method doesn't work with my dac - setting "dwc_otg.speed=1" means it can't connect. For those dacs using less of the usb bus its probably a good step, but I'm hoping they can fully resolve the packet loss issue as without doing so its not really appropriate for hifi dacs (my target)