derekc;154754 Wrote: > > The whole relationship between the slimserver and SB3 is totally > confusing. They just don't seem to get on. When slimserver is > communicating with the SB3, is SB3 talking directly to the web, or is > it going via the Laptop. Who knows.
Well that confusion is part of why you are confused, so perhaps I can help. The Squeezebox is a "slim device," (hence the company name) or in less polite terms, a dumb terminal. It obviously has no local disc, so you can't store music on it, but it also has very little else: it has a very nice crisp display, some great audio circuitry, a network interface or two if you have wireless, and a CPU to tie all those together. The real functionality (what to display, where music lives, even whether it is "on" or "off") all comes from a server. There isn't even a clock on the Squeezebox: when it displays time, that is because the server said, "hey, draw this!" and it has no idea what it is drawing. Squeezebox2 and later can either use a local server for control, or they can use Squeezenetwork. They can only be on one or the other at a given time, just like a network aware printer can only print from one machine at a time or you would have a mess. The "problem" with the BBC radio programs is that they are in Real Audio, so they can't be on Squeezenetwork. (Assuming it was legal, your radio station would have to send all its data to California, be re-encoded as mp3, and then retransmitted back. Lots of room for failure and degraded audio to boot! In practice, it would almost certainly require Slim to get a license for re-encoding the station.) So the best way to do formats like Real Audio is to have your local server do it: it can grab the station directly, and then transcode it to a WAV or FLAC (lossless! so no further degradation in quality) and then send it to your Squeezebox. It does mean you need to keep your laptop on for BBC radio, which is why a lot of people either piece together a cheapo box or a NAS device and use that for a server. Remember very little is actually -in- the Squeezebox: the playlists and favorites are saved on a server. Remembering which server that is (either your own or Squeezenetwork's) can be tricky. Slim hopes to make the transition between local and squeezenetwork more transparent in the future, but that will be a while. -- snarlydwarf ------------------------------------------------------------------------ snarlydwarf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1179 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29700 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
