I finally got a squeezbox hooked up in the house. So far I don't think I can be more impressed with the actual unit. The fidelity is excellent with .flac and the IR remote control is really quite easy to use. I'd much rather do this than try and integrate and Ipod.
The next step is to download Itunes and see how the two play together. Anyone doing this currently?

I have one customer using Itunes with the squeezebox. They are having lots of problems with the squeezebox losing track of all of the music. So the plan is to set it up here before I go to the customers house to try and track down the problems.

I have not tried this setup yet but probably will do soon. Please let us know how it goes, I'd be very interested...

HAve several installs that have squeezebox with iTunes. Now I have had iTunes mess up the computer... that is different.

But with current slimserver and iTunes... no issues to report.

OBVIOUS DRM thing ofcourse. Can't use purchased songs... I think that is still the way it is for now.

Springs - was it you that uses it with a Buffalo NAS drive? Part of the problem they are having is that Itunes keeps loosing the link to the NAS drive. Probably just need to setup some static IPs for that portion of it.

Have used Slimserver running off of a NAS. That worked but it was a little slow.

Have run slimserver on the computer accessing the NAS. That worked fine.

Have used a NAS with a Sonos.

Have not tried moving itunes Directory to the NAS yet. I was going to try that with Sonos on Saturday.

Static the IP and let me know. If i get to my job first I will report back.

But the only differance being this will be a Sonos install. Maybe I will just drag along a squeezebox... well it is a Saturday morning install. Maybe I will want to actually have some time off.

springs - Once I select a CD play, it lists all the track numbers but instead of the track title it shows the year the CD was made. Any idea how I go about correcting that?

Are you saying you installed slimsever right on the NAS? I wasn't aware you could run an OS with an application right on the smaller NAS drives. I knew you could do it on some of the big stations, and that seems like it would be ideal. My "server" is an old PII450 machine. Serving one stream it uses 2% to 5% CPU with occasional spikes to 80%

I still have to say this is one of the coolest new things I've used in a long time. It seems Sonos is still a better choice with the wireless 2-way control but as a cheap single source music source with good IR control this thing is great.

Escient had the ability to asign a discreet IR code for playlists. That's something I definately want in the Sqeezebox

Is it just me, or are there more of you out there that HATE iTunes?

I try to avoid 'allowing' clients to use their PC to stream things from, try to get them to use a NAS running Twonkyvision or something similar, and get iTunes to use the NAS as its main library (directory). It's a lot less pain.

I understand what you're saying but in the case of the squeezebox you do need a the slimserver software running for it to work. In my case that's an old PC.

Frankly all of this is a good argument for Sonos over the Squeezebox.

See here...
[Link: twonkyvision.de]

I love Twonkyvision! (sort of)
I used to run my Roku's off a Linksys NSLU2 and a standard USB external drive. I'm sure the Squeezebox will work with Twonky.

You can change the display options under player settings. You can have it dispalky just the title or title+artist... etc. Go to the setup page... ://localhost:9000 select the player and there is the option to change the display.

You can load slimserver into the linux running on a Buffalo Linkstation. I have a kurobox wich is just the guts of a linkstaion sans harddrive. there is a yahoo group that developes this search for yahoo groups and linkstation.

Running FLAC only I could run one Squeezebox with no hick ups. The browsing was a little slow from the front of the unit. And the unit would hick up while rescanning music library.

Running on a normal computer then I can do all the cool stuff like remote streaming. Multiple boxes. On the fly conversions for bandwidth.

Only reall issue I really have is when I try to link players there is often a mis sync. Sonos doesn't have that issue. But they again it has its own lists of Pros and Cons.

So what would you consider the cons of Sonos?

Major Sonos con is it is almost impossible to integrate with other control systems (I have heard of some people having some luck thou')
Not standard width components.
Units must be spaced out to give decent controller coverage, 'home run' installs are virtually useless.

Static IP'd and maped the drive.. set to reconnect at logon.
Windows had it nailed

On the Mac I had to make an alias once I linked to the NAS. Then I saved the noexistant password to the key chain. Rebooted and the link came right back up.

When I ran Slimserver at home off of the NAS I was running Slimserver on my P4 2.8G PC. Had Slimsever set up to use the netbios name/share/Music Directory... I don't use iTunes at home.

Long and short of it was that once I took the steps above iTunes had no issue.