timewaster #642

despite ostensibly spending all my time this week studying for yet another certification test as well as working on big important projects©, i found myself futzing around with the open source slimserver software.

why? well, the slim squeezebox is the other major device that works like my roku soundbridge to stream music from my mac full of music to the stereo, and while i’m quite happy with my soundbridge, there’s always room for improvement, right? at the very least, i should know whether i’m using the best solution or not. it’s ok to live with the less optimal solution, but you’ve got to know, at least. ignorance is unforgiveable.

warning: lots of technical babble follows here. continue at your own glossy-eyed risk.

on the upside, the new squeezebox is very cool looking. nice display, and the audio specs look really good.

the audio DAC might possibly be of higher quality, and there’s much more support for other codecs, including things like ogg-vorbis and FLAC. things that make internet audio geeks cream their pants. the usual consumer, not so much.

the downside is that this device seems to require you run their slimserver on your machine. one of the things i really love about the roku is that it can just feed off of itunes as a client, and you don’t have to set up anything extra. this is a definite plus.

however, i thought, if it’s just some software that automatically syncs with itunes in the background, maybe it’s not so bad. if it’s just a service, then what’s the difference?

ugh.

the difference is that my old little underpowered imac dv can’t handle running anything else. especially this behemoth, whatever it is. the moment i started the slimserver software up, my mac started running at a slow crawl. everything took seconds to run, even switching between apps became onerous. after much futzing, i could get the roku to see and even connect to the slimserver instance, but navigating through the menus took minutes. and it tried to play, but nothing ever came out. likewise running the java slimplayer: slow connection to the server, but playing was fruitless.

it dawned on me that this process was really ridiculous: i was running itunes, and then an app that sucked down the itunes library, and then streamed the itunes stream out as another stream.

wtf?

let’s take my miata, and stick it in the trunk of the land cruiser as the engine. now, let’s try and drive around! wheee!

the difference is clear to me: slim devices are basically dumb interfaces and the processing and streaming is performed by the slimserver software, whereas the roku devices are tiny linux boxes running their software, so the interface and processing are done by themselves, not the music hosting server.

basically, where do you want your computer power to be? in the player, or in the server?

i guess if you have a hefty machine, it maybe makes sense for it to be in the server. this is what enables transcoding from all the different codecs to WAV to the squeezebox. it also allows it to synchronize streams to different squeezeboxes if you’ve got several, because it’s running the stream.

but then if that’s the case? why am i paying all this money for what is essentially a hardware implementation of a dumb java interface?

at least with my soundbridge it’s actually doing something.

Posted at October 27, 2005 10:45 PM