really pleased with Logitech Squeezebox Duet

[rplace]

Hopefully I am just off to a shaky start but my first impression are less than stellar. No amount of effort has let me put in my newly created account with SBox into the SqueezeServer software. I get an email saying I must confirm my account. I click on the link and get a page telling me I must confirm my account...but no way to do it? WTF!!?? Messed for several hours and no go. So I call customer support and it rings and rings....and rings. Eventually computer sort of voice say I will be disconnected now. No sort of formal SBox branding on the message or anything and yes I calld during proper support times.

My remote's buttons for pause/previous/next did not work. That seemed so basic I don't see how they could not. So I took the battey out and in essence rebooted it and now that woks...but does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling off the bat.

Questions for any happy users:

Is there anyway to NOT have a computer running? I can't see how as the SQServer seems to run on your computer only. I was envisioning (not sure why but I was) that the "box" connected to the audio system would handle the leg work while the remote would let me select things. It appears they real work is done by your computer.

Do you have to put all your music in one spot (folder) and reference that via the contol pannel? That is click the proper tab on the settings and browse to one directory that contains all you music under it? I was hoping to have a NAS device connected to my network and the SBox system would scan the entire network for all music. That is how my Audiotron worked and that is how WinAmp and others work. You can point them to a specific location or just let them run wild and find all music.

The wheel/buttons/battery door seems really flimsy, does anyone feel this way?

How do you add an entire album or artist to the currently playing stack of music. This one has to be user error on my part because there is no way they expect you to browse to an album then add each song individually. Or worse browse to an artist and add each song from each album one at a time. I am nto talking about making a playlist and saving it. Lets just say I want to add all Rolling Stones LPs for the given moment. I figued it out on the web interface, but not on the remote. And it is the remote I am truly interested in. I want to be rid of my computer and device interface and do everything on the remote if possible.

Anyone know if is possible to run the web app on a browser equiped phone? For the time being I like the web interface better than the remote and it would be handy to grab the phone from poolside to manage things on the weekend.

Sorry for the long rant...just sort of bummed out currently. Hopefully with some more time this weekend we fall in love. At this point I am 50/50 on sending it back.

[gnatnoop]

ups delivered today, started at about 7, everything was up and running in about 20 minutes, including downloading the server software.

have had zero glitches, listening to radio streamed over the net right now....have been listening to cd's i ripped this past week.

yes, the battery compartment door is a little flimsy but not too bad, everything is solid when you get it back in place.

there is no delay, i select a different ripped album, it starts instantaneously.

sound quality will be assessed over the next few days, so far so good however.

[Daddy Dee]

rplace,

sorry hear your setup has been a pita.

I don't know the answers to most of your questions, but a couple

the remote feels OK to me, that's a subjective thing, though.

The music does not need to in a single directory. In my experience the scan finds music all over the pc.

I'm not clear about the need for the pc to run. One of the selling points is that the pc can be off, but my remote looks for the pc to be running. Haven't tried internet radio if the pc is off.

hope things go well this weekend.

[gnatnoop]

i noted tonight that as i added ripped cd's to the hard drive, i had to tell the server software to rescan for it to find the new music.

the pc does need to be on for listening to ripped cd, obviously, don't know about internet services, will try that in a day or two......

[Daddy Dee]

tried to access internet radio w/o laptop on, still looks for the pc first. don't know if there is a work around here or not.

[angelababy]

I been toying with the idea of getting one too,this is interesting, It's the best addition I've made in a long time. Thanks for your concise review!

[rplace]

Things got better over the weekend. I managed to get by the annoying bit of playing an entire album or an entire artist for that matter...for the record it was user error on my part...but being a software desiginer I much add it was not all that intuitive[] so I can't imagine how someone like my 70-something parents would work with this right out of the box. Zero documentation in paper form. There is a decen online community. To really make this shine you have to be a bit of a tinkerer. I am sure once it is all ironed out it will be a joy, but for now it is not quite the plug and play I was expecting.

Also found out that if you are a Android phone owner (probably iphone too) that you can get severa free and pay apps to control the SBox devices over you phone! That is wicked cool for out in the back yard where you might not want that remote. You don't have all the features on the phone...but more than just the basics.

The wife and I stayed up past midnight on Saturday with her playing master DJ via the remote while I added a few from the phone, turned up/down the volume and skipped tracks. With literally 1,000s of songs at our finger tips it was a trip down memory lane. Play this, no this...what is up next...remember hearing that during XXX time in our life. All great fun.

Still not happy with a computer being on 24/7. But I see how a NAS will fix that. So I alreay am in for the pirce of the SBox and an upgraded wireless network (mine was from the dark ages) so I can see how this is quickly going to turn into a fairly pricy addition.

Kudos that the receiver is so small and easy to move around and reattach itself to the network. In less then 3 minutes I can have it swapped out from the living room to my listening room. Of course the ultimate solution wold be another box, but that is again more $$$.

DD, I think you might have produced a small scale stimulus package from me to the like of Logitech, Linksys and QNAP.

Final quesiton for now. Does anyone think higher end audio files (specifically FLAC) sound worse on it? Wonder if it has to convert them on the fly to mp3 or something. I did not do a ton of critical listening...but something just did not seem right.

[sputnik]

I run mine exclusively for internet radio and Pandora without a computer. Set-up was way easy - it found the wireless signal with no problem at all. It's been flawless so far after about six months. [Y]

[merkin]

I have had a classic for about 3 years now. My PC needs to be on for any service. I have it hard wired to my router and have my squeeze server on my desk top PC up stairs. Don't hear any computer noise at all. I ripped all my CD's to I tunes in a loss less format so I could load them on my ipod also. It works great for a music server. I also subscribe to rhapsody and listen to it all the time through my squeeze box. I browse the what's playing now thread get ideas and add them to my rhapsody library. For 10 bucks a month I have access to 10's of thousands of CD's to listen to. If I like them I can buy them and down load them, but most of the time I go out and buy the CD instead. The sound quality on my ripped CD's is great. The rhapsody down loads though are mp3 I think. Sometimes there is a little connectivity problems especially when there are updates to sofeware. Once I figured it out it has been running pretty smooth.