Slimserver

After ten months I am still very happy with the Pandora personalized music service. Most of the time I use the Squeezebox to stream Pandora radio at home. But treating the Pandora like radio does not stop me from listening to CDs. This is a funny story, as I do not play a CD more than once after I buy it. The first thing I do after unboxing a CD is ripping it to a harddrive. It may or may not be legal, I do not care. By all means it fits my sense of fair use. I buy the CD, but actually I do not want a CD, I want the music that is recorded on this CD. And I put the music on my harddrive for convenience. Sync to the iPod, play on a notebook and play on my home stereo. But if you like shuffling music like I do (this has a lot in common with shuffling moods...), and if you are as lazy as I am, you must admit taking a CD from a shelf, putting it on a tray is far too complicated. So this is the primary reason why I rip my CDs. Having them on a computer is having them all in one place and being able to select ANY song in a second.

But there is one gap. Between the harddrive and the speakers. You can theoretically connect your PC to the amplifier, but this has several drawbacks. First, PCs are noisy. Second, I do not actually have a PC, as I use a notebook. And I like sitting with in in an armchair and reading news and such. Carrying a cable from the notebook to the amplifier and speakers does not seem to be the best idea in the wireless world we live in. Of course there is stereo Bluetooth (A2DP). But for the same reason I bought the Squeezebox to free the Pandora from the arms of a PC, it is a great idea to use the same Squeezebox to play music stored on a local drive. Squeezeboxes can do this. They need an access to a software called Slimserver, running somewhere on the local network. So you need something to run the Slimserver on. Being written in Perl, Slimserver is one of the ultimately portable pieces of software I know of. I even managed to run it on a small NAS (Network Attached Storage) server called Slug. But as the name implies, the Slug was slow and thus annoying in practice. So recently I finally decided I need a full featured server at home. A machine that is up all the time, fast enough to at least run the Slimserver software and compact enough to be stored in some well hidden place. And of course I would not want to spend a fortune on it. Thanks to a friendly service called Overto (auctions aggregator, currently only in Polish), I found a second hand, lunchbox - style machine. Lunchbox means just a standard PC, but with built-in LCD screen and a handle to carry. It is an old Dolch PAC 65, Pentium II/400, 256 RAM, standard 3,5" harddrive and 5 PCI slots. $80 for the lot seemed like a good deal, the MAPS Windows XP licence was in fact worth more... (btw I should finally learn how to put Ubuntu or Fedora on these things...). After putting a WiFi card inside and installing all the software I took the server down to the basement and plugged into the mains socket. It is very convenient to have a server box with just one cable (power). No external screen, network is wireless, clean and elegant. A bit noisy fans, but in the basement... who cares...

Slimserver - the perfect bridge between the harddrive filled with music and an amplifier.