The Squeezebox really is that good

Sadly, I purchased my Logitech Sqeezebox back in November but had procrastinated in doing the installation until today (March!). That was a big mistake, because this little box and the service that goes with it is amazing.

I purchased the Squeezebox for one very specific purpose - to enable me to access the Rhapsody.com music subscription service. I have had a Rhapsody.com account for a few years now, and have been extremely happy with the selection of music and overall performance. I am a huge fan of the 'rent my music' school of media consumption (vs. the 'own my music' school), which the Rhapsody service model directly supports. The only drawback is that you have to use your computer to access the service. I was partly handicapped due to the fact that I use Ubuntu Linux at home, limiting me to using Rhapsody.com's web-based interface. It works, but tends to cause Firefox to die periodically. What I really wanted was to play Rhapsody music using my existing (more and more infrequently used) home stereo.

Although I think the Squeezebox's original intent was to allow you to play music stored on your local/home PC over your stereo, the device also supports multiple on-line music services (Rhapsody, Pandora, Last.fm and others). The setup was dead simple: Turned it on, and used the remote control to quickly configure the Squeezebox to connect to my home WiFi network. At the end of the device setup sequence, the LCD displayed a device PIN that I could use to access and then control the device over the net.

I then pointed my browser at www.squeezenetwork.com and registered the device using the PIN. Once registered, I could then configure the Squeeze Network to access my Rhapsody.com account. Again, no problems encountered.

And now, nirvana. Sitting at my desk in the home office accessing my squeezenetwork.com account in Firefox I can browse, search and play any of the 3 million or so tracks available within Rhapsody.com over my home stereo. All of the device capabilities can be controlled by the browser, and the changes are near instant. I click 'Next track' in the browser and within 1 second the next track starts streaming via the Squeezebox. Totally amazing. It solved my problem completely.