Slim Devices and Infrant Make Expensive Music Together

Other Features

Poking around in the documentation that came with the Squeezebox, I found references to the music server configuration. The documentation was written as if you were installing and configuring the server on your PC, but a bit of extrapolation on my part told me I could also likely reach the server on the ReadyNAS the same way. To test this theory out, I pointed my browser to the IP address of the ReadyNAS on port 9000 and was greeted with a Slimserver configuration page as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7: Slimserver Web Interface (click image to enlarge)

Digging into this page revealed a wealth of options, allowing complete customization of display type, language settings, folder settings, music groupings, etc. There were many options, so I won't be able to describe them all in this review, but I'll mention a couple of interesting ones.

One of the features I had a bit of fun with was the RSS feed capability (Figure 8). I configured the Squeezebox to scroll headlines from my favorite news sites when it was in idle mode. If your favorite Website has an RSS feed, you can add it to the list and you'll get its display. Neat.

Figure 8: RSS Display

Other options along this line would allow you to keep up with stock quotes, sports scores, etc. You can even configure it to act as a fancy clock radio that wakes you to your favorite Internet Radio station or a song from your library. There were also options allowing you to specify what would happen when transitioning from one song to the next. For example, a cross-feed setting would configure it so that as one song was finishing, the next would start in an over-lapping fade out/in mode.

Since I only had one Squeezebox for review, I wasn't able to test the synchronization feature. Slim Devices supports the ability to synchronize multiple Squeezeboxes on the network. This means that you can walk from one room to the next and hear the same song. If you purchase the ReadyNAS/Squeezebox bundle, you'll be able to take advantage of this feature.

Comparing it once again to the Sonos bundle, I found the same capability. It too could synchronize multiple players on the network. As far as server software goes, the Sonos system takes a different approach with no music server software per se. It instead relies on mounting a network share that contains music. And as far as extras such as RSS feeds, weather, etc., the Sonos system provides none of these interesting capabilities.