Squeezebox - Free Your Music

How does it work?

An overview

When you buy music these days on a CD, all you are really buying is some artwork and some song data formatted in a special way. This special way is called a music CD.

When you put this CD into a CD player, a few things happen:

  1. The song data is read off the music disk by the read mechanism.
  2. a few seconds of music are stored in temporary computer memory. The amount of memory depends on the player.
  3. The data is fed to a special chip in the CD player called a Digital to Analog converter, turning it into an electrical signal.
  4. The electrical signal is amplified and
  5. sent to speakers or headphones so you can hear it

A Squeezebox changes this just a little bit. The changes are in bold

  1. The song data is read off the music disk once by your home computer. The entire song is stored on a hard disk in your home computer. You never have to do this step again.
  2. You chose a song with the remote.
  3. The squeezebox asks the home computer for the song data over the network.
  4. The home computer reads the song data from the hard disk and sends it over the network The song is just data and it flows over the network like all other computer data.
  5. The data is fed to a special chip in the squeezebox called a Digital to Analog converter, turning it into an electrical signal.
  6. The electrical signal is amplified and
  7. sent to speakers or headphones so you can hear it

For the more technical

Ignore the wireless parts of the drawing for a second. They are optional and can be ignored for a second.

(There is also a bit of confusion in this drawing - in most systems, the ethernet wire (marked optional here) goes to the router and not directly to the computer).

On the left you have a computer. It has a fair sized hard disk (or you can plug in a big external one - these are cheap and easy to get these days). You take every CD you own and read them into the computer, a process called, for some reason lost to modern man, RIPing. Your normal music CD contains perhaps 60 minutes of music. RIPing is faster than playing, but it still takes perhaps 10 minutes per CD.

Once some music is on the home computer, you can go to the squeezebox, and using the remote, you can browse through the music you have, select a song or an album to play. You can add more music to your "playlist" at any time, so the hits keep on coming. You can even select a random play feature, so it choses at random from all the songs on the hard disk.

If you listen to music with headphones, you can plug them into the headphones jack. If you prefer listening on your home stereo, there are RCA connections and digital audio connections, depending on which connection your home stereo uses.

And that's really all there is to it. It can be made a lot more sophisticated and complex than that, but that's the essence of it.

Oh, and one other thing. Internet Radio.

Internet radio is a new idea. You've probably run into it, but not realized what you were hearing.

Most radio stations have web sites these days, where you can read the news or the weather if you catch it on the radio. Some now have a "listen live" button you can click to hear what they're currently broadcasting. That's internet radio broadcasting.

Thing is, most of it sounds pretty lousy. There are several reasons for that.

  1. The speakers inside your computer might not be so good.
  2. The D-A converter in your computer isn't very good.
  3. The radio station hasn't taken internet broadcasting seriously yet and hasn't put much resources into it yet.
  4. There might be interference on the internet between the radio station and you.

The Squeezebox can't solve all of those problems, but it basically solves the first 2. A Cable modem or DSL modem usually takes care of 4. The radio station sound quality will only improve when people write to the radio station and ask for improvements. Many radio stations know this is an up and coming technology and they have improvements scheduled or in process that will make internet radio sound fabulous.

How it works, Hardware, Software

Buy one here.

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