Squeezebox Duet

New multiroom Squeezebox from Logitech. The new one is called the Squeezebox Duet. Looks quite nice with the colour display remote. I prefer the look of this one over the Sonos as well.

It says you can get just the remote and use it to control your existing Squeezebox, too. Of course, the remote by itself is still $300.

Grin - I was looking at that earlier this weekend when I was digging around the slimdevices remote.

I want one!!

There's a section here about the controller including some on the architecture.

Looks very interesting indeed. Have to see how quick the UI is but the SlimDevices people have been pretty good OSS citizens.

I do think it should have had 3 unlabelled buttons on the remote down each side of the screen a la ATM machines.

I prefer the form factor of the Sonos over this and remember really liking the one Hugo had. However, I found that Currys are now selling the Sonos and for some reason the UI on it is dog slow. I don't remember Hugo's being that slow.

The beta hardware had:


ran Linux.

I do! And it crashed quite a bit too I think?

This looks like a great product. $300 for a remote that can control every player in the house, even the Rio's, I think I have finally found the solution for my kitchen after 3 years, the rio can hide in a corner and this can be used up front

Cheers

Cris.

Wow, I really like that!

Check it out, it has a little headphone output too, so its like a little battery powered Squeezebox in its own right. Perfect for hooking up to a pair of computer speakers at a barbecue, or using headphones while hoovering the house. Like an at-home-wireless-streaming-centralised-iPod I guess.

Cute.

From what I understand there isn't anything that takes advantage of the headphone output yet though.

Oh right, I didn't read more than the spec actually. Nice idea though, if the rest of the hardware was up to it.

I only remember it crashing once and I suppose it could've been FITNR.

It's a nice product, but given the $1 = £1 rule that seems to apply, it's way too expensive for me to justify.

Its already on the UK Logitech site for £279

What's the advantage over having a squeezebox in each room? (sorry if I'm being dim)

You put one of the displayless Squeezebox units into each room and control it with the fancy new colour LCD remote.

Gotcha, sorry. Now why don't they do one of them that serves audio AND video?

Picture(s) and video available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonbauer/2201055378/

- Jon

Thanks for that Jon, it is looking quite good.

It was interesting to see that the guy demoing it fell for exactly the same usability issue that I have seen beta testers complain of. The first time he tried to play something he hit the select button to try and play it, which of course drills further down and gives the track info. You can see him take a second to work out what he did wrong before hitting the play button instead.

Wonder if the Empeg team wish they'd remained independent a while longer, certainly seemed to work for the Slim guys.

I'm actually glad the select button drills down. They should however make sure there's a long-press option to start playing on it.

Of course I'd prefer if the method to drill down involved pressing a button to the right. The mechanical scroll wheel precludes buttons within the scroll area though.

With their layout the first thing to improve the unit would have been to swap the Home and "+" buttons. Their positions are completely illogical right now.

They also need a sot of quick-menu that can be invoked while on th enow playing display. It would pop up a few option for relevant commands, such as Shuffle Toggle and Repeat Toggle. DId you catch how awkward it was to find Shuffle in the video?

The good thing here is that all this stuff can be changed. It isn't horribly set up and forever doomed to be crap like the iPod UI.

A while longer than the 2000 purchase, the 2003 purchase, or the 2005 purchase?

We had three attempts at finding a parent company who knew what in Sam Hill they were doing. Not many groups get a fourth

Peter

Great video! Thanks!

They may as well ship one direct to my house from the factory

Cheers

Cris.

I meant the original 2000 one, I think Sean held onto his independence long enough to generate a big enough community/customer base to break out of the geek only marketplace. SlimDevices and the Empeg/Rio products are the only really well thought out and (for the most part) executed products in their sector, apart from the iPod (that I've seen anyway).

I wish I'd actually had the bottle to approach you guys with an investment offer, I had free cash back then.

It was tricky, we really desperately needed cash - making things gets seriously expensive, especially when you need to buy hundreds of thousands of pounds of components up-front... we had a very understanding bank manager, but it was starting to take rather more than that! We did go looking for various types of investment but at the time everyone was after a dot com to invest in - a company that actually *made* stuff was so last millenia - and we didn't manage to get any traction at all.

Obviously, we were pretty naive thinking that a big company would have everything really sorted out otherwise they could never have got that big. Turns out they were way more dysfunctional that we could have ever imagined...

Hugo

I'd have to add Tivo (and possibly ReplayTV) to this list. The modern Tivo has music-playing that appears to not suck (haven't really used it much yet), and it has output to your TV, which is always nice. Of course, you don't get any multiroom goodness.

I wouldn't call the ipod well thought out.

Well, I think it's well thought out for what it is.

It's not feature-rich for geeks like us.
It's a point-and-shoot camera, not an SLR.

And of course, the iPod Shuffle is a "shoot first and ask questions later" camera.

An interesting analogy, but I've used point-and-shoot cameras, which were well thought out, despite not being feature rich. I wouldn't put the ipod in the same category.

The ipod looks pretty. Beyond that, though...

That really does seem to be what Apple has been doing with their latest revisions to the iPod line.

"iPod, now prettier!"

What's under the hood has been a mixed bag of small feature additions and deletions along the way.

I am pleased to say that I am now the proud owner of a Squeezebox Controller and Receiver. I have to say they are very, very good.

Full review to follow when I stop grinning

I must admit I am very tempted!

Full review please

Cheers

Cris.

I'm also still really interested in this.

Ditto. I've got a graphical Squeezebox 1 which I'm thinking of upgrading.

Here you go . This is part one, the Controller just has too much functionality to cover in one go

I have to say it is brilliant, I have no hesitation it recommending it to anyone.

I've had the Duet for a couple of weeks now, so I thought it was time for part 2 of my review. I have still barely covered all the functionality though.

Mmm.. That device is just begging for a SqueezeCenter interface that can control playback from a docked empeg..



EDIT: Or for that matter, running SqueezeCenter s/w on an empeg would be useful, as well!

I think the empeg might well struggle to run SqueezeCenter well. Some of the low spec Linux NAS boxes don't cope with it well.

The easiest way to get access to the music on the empeg might be via iTunes. Wasn't there an app for the empeg that would make music available to iTunes ? If so the SqueezeCenter iTunes functionality might well be able to access it.

Edit: a UPNP implementation for the empeg would achieve the same result I think, no idea how involved that it

Firefly Media Server/MT-DAAPD is the program that pretends to be iTunes.

Mike (mcomb) modified daapd to work on the empeg, but it looks like his site is down now. I do have it installed on my main empeg still, so if necessary, I can always pull the binaries off and repost them. It still works fine, showing up in iTunes 7 and plays music.