Oh Sweet Mystery of Life At Last I’ve Found You

Sweet Sweet Squeezebox! Where have you been all of my life?

Today I came into possession of a Squeezebox. This thing is…well… It’s just beautiful. Such a piece of work. It’s enough to bring tears to my eyes, it really is.

OK, perhaps I’m over-dramatizing a bit. But this really is the slickest keenest toy I’ve seen in a long darn time. Ya see, I have a lot of music. And I listen to it at least eight hours a day. Often much more. A few years ago I completed the project to rip all of my CDs to mp3 and store them onto cdroms. Yes, this allowed me to carry my entire collection in a single (very large) CD case. But it was always a hassle flipping through the thing to find the one album or track that I felt like hearing.

Two or three months ago I started the process of dumping the contents of all of those cdroms back onto harddrive. It took a very long time and so much space that… Well, let’s just say that until recently harddrive prices were such that it was not economically feasible to purchase enough storage space for it all. Anyway, this allowed me to stream my music from my home server to my audio player at work, but there was still the inconvenience of having to find a disc and put it into the player if I wanted to listen to anything in my own home. Oh, the travails one must face.

That problem is solved by Squeezebox. It plugs into the receiver in my front room and wirelessly streams music to it from the server sitting in my office. The music collection is completely searchable from my couch. Or anywhere else, if I point a web browser to the correct place. If I want, I can even use it to stream radio stations from the web, so I have an ever-changing selection of music at my fingertips.

Honest, I don’t think I can fully express just how much I love this thing. I really can’t.

Many thanks must go out to Guy (what else is new?) for helping me to figure out some network woes. As ever he’s exceedingly patient and tolerant of my ignorant questions.