AirTunes vs Squeezebox

August 9, 2006 4:28 PM

How does the AirTunes feature of Apple's Airport Express compare to the Squeezebox for home music listening? (More about my needs behind the cut.)

We have a home network consisting of two desktops, a small Linux server machine, and a varying number of laptops.

We currently listen to music exclusively on our computers, but we're thinking of buying a home stereo system to put in our living room so we can better listen to music out there.

The actual playing of audio CDs is not a concern. All music would still be kept on the computers. The arrangement of our living space dictates that whatever music-streaming solution we choose must be wireless.

The Squeezebox looks nice, but is twice the price of an Airport Express. I can see where the server model is useful, but I'm not particularly opposed to either playing through iTunes or buying Airfoil so I can keep using foobar2000.

For my needs, does it sound like Squeezebox is worth paying 2x as much? (Is its sound quality vastly better, for instance?)

(A recent ask.metafilter was quite enthusiastic about the potential of a modded XBox as a full-on media center. But I'm fairly sure that would wind up costing more than the Squeezebox. Streaming video content from the computers would be nice, though.)

posted by Kemayo to computers & internet (16 comments total)

Well, they are two different kinds of devices, really. The Airport Express is a "push" type of device. The music is decoded on your computer and broadcast to the AExp. All navigation of your music collection occurs on the computer; you can't even skip to the next track without being in the same room as the machine. The Squeezebox is a "pull" device; it grabs files from your server and decodes them on-board. As such it has its own UI for choosing what you want to listen to and you don't have to be in the same room (or, indeed, the same country) as the source of the music, and your computer doesn't even have to be on if you just want to listen to Internet radio.

The benefit of Airport Express is that you don't need anything besides iTunes... for Squeezebox, you need to install a piece of software called SlimServer. (It's easy to set up, though.)

The Roku SoundBridge is another "pull" device sort of like the SlimServer, except it works directly with iTunes, which is convenient. I like mine.

If you want something that will pull video and audio, check out the El Gato EyeHome, assuming you have a Mac (the server only runs on the Mac despite being written in Java, go figure). It plays Divx as well as MP3 and photos over the network. They've apparently stopped making them but you can probably still find one somewhere.
posted by kindall at 4:51 PM on August 9, 2006

A squeezebox works really well if you have a server that's always on for something else (fileserver, bittorent machine, whatever).
It works less well if you always have to turn on a computer for it to get to the music.

Keep in mind, it has a display, unlike the airport, and you can control your music with the remote.

Really, they are two different products.
One is designed to fit into your stereo as a component, and the other is desgned to send your computer audio elsewhere.
posted by madajb at 4:53 PM on August 9, 2006

Also keep in mind if you have copy-protected itunes music, the squeezebox can't play them.
posted by madajb at 4:54 PM on August 9, 2006

I assume the Sqeezebox can't play tunes bought from the iTMS, if that matters to you.
posted by mkultra at 4:56 PM on August 9, 2006

For your needs, Airport Express is great. The only issue is that, to play music from the desktops, you'll have to connect the AE to another wired router; I'm not sure how that would work. If you're just going to play music from the laptops, then you're for sure good to go.
posted by The Michael The at 5:11 PM on August 9, 2006

The Michael The writes "The only issue is that, to play music from the desktops, you'll have to connect the AE to another wired router"

What do you mean? If the AE is on the same subnet as the desktop, iTunes on the desktop should be able to see it. It doesn't matter if the AE is connected wirelessly and the desktop is wired....
posted by mr_roboto at 5:31 PM on August 9, 2006

Our Airport Express works well except when we run the microwave which is across a room (25') and behind a wall from it. When we run the microwave the audio drops out for a few seconds.
posted by nonmyopicdave at 5:59 PM on August 9, 2006

A modded Xbox would cost much less than a squeezebox. 2nd hand boxes are going for around $100 on eBay. Mod chip: ~$40. Remote: $20. Those, plus some time investment, are your only costs. You could even save the cost of the chip by going the softmod route.
posted by blag at 6:08 PM on August 9, 2006

What do you mean? If the AE is on the same subnet as the desktop, iTunes on the desktop should be able to see it. It doesn't matter if the AE is connected wirelessly and the desktop is wired....

Clearly mr_roboto is much more of a network guru than I am. Listen to him.
posted by The Michael The at 6:34 PM on August 9, 2006

I have both a Squeezebox and an Airport Express. While both are mp3-repository-to-stereo adapters, to me the Squeezebox is nicer because it looks and acts like a piece of stereo equipment. No computer, keyboard, mouse, etc. is required to select and play songs.

If you don't want to turn on your computer monitor and fiddle with a mouse, and instead you want to drive your music from the comfort of your easy chair, get a Squeezebox. If you're always on the computer anyway, get an Airport Express.

Note the above comment about the microwave interference. If you use either wirelessly, you may experience dropouts if there are a lot of other 2.4GHz devices around. You don't notice these dropouts when surfing the Web because they're transitory, but they can wreck havoc on the timeliness streaming data. Sometimes you can fix these dropouts by changing Wi-Fi channels or repositioning your Wi-Fi router. Sometimes you just gotta suck it up and go Ethernet.
posted by todbot at 6:53 PM on August 9, 2006

squeezebox is much nicer. i've had a slimp3 for years. also http://hymn-project.org

my microwave sometimes blows out the slimp3, which is connected to a wireless bridge. but you can solve that problem by using powerline networking.
posted by joeblough at 8:41 PM on August 9, 2006

A modded Xbox would cost much less than a squeezebox

You forgot to include the wireless adapter.
posted by smackfu at 9:18 PM on August 9, 2006

I also have both units, and a lot of experience with both.

As others are saying, the major difference is that the Airport ties into iTunes, and the Squeezebox requires a server program running. That means you need a machine on 24x7 somewhere in the house. It doesn't have to be lightning quick, but don't go bottom of the barrel for the music server.. the software is written in Perl, and it can be a bit sluggish if you have a lot of music on a slow system. You can likely install it on a desktop system and never notice its presence.

In my case, I use the music players as as digital transports to DACs in the receiver, so the built-in sound quality is unimportant to me. The Squeezebox, however, is audiophile-grade quality at computer-product pricing. It'll stand toe to toe with $1k+ CD players in all respects... DAC quality is superb, and the transport jitter is exceedingly low.

It has a high quality display, and comes with a remote... you can find and play any of your music without needing a laptop or a trip to the computer room. It also lets guests play with the system without needing to touch a computer, which they tend to like.

The Squeezebox also supports gapless playback. The Airport Express will always click or pop between tracks. Squeezeboxes can play seamlessly if you're using FLAC files. This was actually the deal-breaker for me on the Airport.... Pink Floyd with pops between tracks is annoying as hell. If you don't listen to soundtracks and concept rock, it may not bother you.

The Squeezebox's big disadvantage is its software. It works well, when you find a good version, but the developers are not very careful and most of their major releases are riddled with bugs. The website says that the 'stable' releases are what you should run, and that the 'nightly' builds are dangerous. In actual fact, this is exactly backward; the 'stable' builds usually suck, and the nightlies are usually pretty good. Once you have a setup you like, don't lightly upgrade it. Wait until there's some feature you absolutely must have, or some bug you absolutely must fix. Upgrading Slimserver is usually painful.

Once you have it working, and most of the nightly builds are very good this way, it is great software.

Both units will do bridging, but the SB bridges in client mode, which means that it, and anything behind it, just looks like another laptop or something. The Airport requires WDS mode to do bridging, which kills your bandwidth.... throughput will drop by at least half, and it may or may not like your existing access point. However, the Airport will also serve as an AP, where the Squeezebox cannot, so there's some tradeoff there.

What I would very strongly suggest is to download SlimServer and play with it. It comes with a Java emulator of the hardware player, called SoftSqueeze. That will let you play with the system and understand EXACTLY how it will work before you actually get any hardware or spend any money. And you can, of course, keep running Softsqueeze later... they've done a lot of work to get it to sync pretty well with the hardware units, so you can easily have synchronized music between rooms without spending extra money. (note: you get pops/clicks between tracks when playing synced music, because the server syncs up all the players at the start of each track.)

It's more geeky and less straightforward, but if you like Foobar, you're gonna WAY prefer a Squeezebox to an Airport Express.
posted by Malor at 9:49 PM on August 9, 2006

An XBox, by the way, is probably a bad solution. They're very loud, and huge. Squeezeboxes and Airports are small, have no moving parts, and are essentially silent. (other than the music, of course. :) )

I also don't think the XBox does true lossless... I think it does a forced 48khz resample. The dedicated players don't do that: they're bitperfect.
posted by Malor at 9:53 PM on August 9, 2006

It's also worth noting that an xbox will use more electricity than either a squeezebox or airport express. This calculation does not include the juice used by a slimserver, but if you've already got a machine going 24/7, it's irrelevant.
posted by rbs at 10:36 PM on August 9, 2006

Kindall: The Airport Express is a "push" type of device. The music is decoded on your computer and broadcast to the AExp. All navigation of your music collection occurs on the computer; you can't even skip to the next track without being in the same room as the machine.

True, unless you buy the USB infrared remote control (can't remember what it's called, even though I have one...) - it connects to the USB port on the Airport Express, and lets you play, stop, pause, fastforward/back or skip forward/back.
It can also be configured for use with other software, but that probably isn't quite as useful unless you're into presentations.

The only downsides are (a) that you can't change playlists, and (b) you can't see the details of the track that is playing.

It's also worth pointing out that the Airport Express can also act as a wireless print connection - although how useful this is in the real world, I have no idea...
posted by Chunder at 1:46 AM on August 10, 2006