Posts Tagged ‘music’

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Logitech Squeezebox Radio mini-review.

January 24th, 2010 by stuffaboutlife | Comments Off | Filed in Technology

After looking at some other products, I bought a Logitech Squeezebox Radio yesterday and wanted to share a little bit of information about it.

First off, the thing sounds pretty good. I was worried about that because of its small size, but it’s been great so far. There’s no AM/FM tuner, but we rarely listen to “free” radio anyway. I got one because most of the media that we listen to comes from the internet via Slacker, Pandora, or Sirius. If we did want to listen to some free (or ‘terrestrial’) FM stations, the Squeezebox can pull internet streams from the Radio Time service. It also has a standard 1/8″ minijack plug (cable included) so I can plug in an iPod if so desired, and I can use the headphone jack to plug it into the stereo receiver. It also has the small LCD screen that shows station information or album art in full color. The controls are the buttons on the front, and they’re durable and easy to use.

As a test, I plugged it into the home stereo receiver and listened to the difference between the Sirius internet stream and the home Sirius unit that we have, and the sound quality was just as good (if not a little better) with the Squeezebox. Setup was very easy, and requires you to make a free Squeezebox account. I did have some trouble getting my WPA2 key for the wifi network entered. It was a little too easy to enter spaces by accident. My suggestion to Logitech is to allow users to enter the wifi information some other way, for example through the Squeezebox Server application. Since it has an ethernet port, I was able to get the thing on my wired network with no problems at all.

This review from Small Net Builder has some take-apart photos, which revealed that the unit actually has a bi-amp set up (woofer & tweeter) inside. Logitech did a good job with this product.

Logitech has a long history of making products that work well with the Mac, which is important to me. The device uses software called Squeezebox Server to stream media from your home library. You can control pretty much any aspect of playback from the Squeezebox Server web interface, which is very nice. The Squeezebox Server software can be installed on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux (and other unix operating systems) and is controlled through your web browser by going to http://localhost:9000/ from the machine it’s installed on. You can control it from other machines by replacing ‘localhost’ with the ip address of the machine hosting your media.

It was $199 MSRP, but Best Buy had them on sale for $149, which I feel is a little bit steep but so far, I’m very happy with the thing. They also make one with a red case, but it was still $199. Best Buy said they’ve sold briskly at the $149 sale price, which was nice to see. Overall, I think it was a good decision and I look forward to learning more about the Squeezebox Server software.

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TuneUp – awesome mp3 collection helper.

December 26th, 2009 by stuffaboutlife | Comments Off | Filed in Technology


Like many of you, my mp3 collection is a mess. One of the things that you don’t get when you rip your own CDs to mp3 is the cover art. Those grey music notes in iTunes look a little boring. While iTunes will download cover art, it doesn’t actually add the artwork to the id3 tag so if you play your music in something else, you’ll lose the album art again.

TuneUp adds the artwork to the id3 tag, which is where it belongs in my opinion. It will scan your library for songs that are missing album art and will pull art from several locations, allowing you to make sure you have the right cover art before adding it.

In this case, all I need to do is select the album art to use and click “Save” and TuneUp will add the artwork to the id3 tag for the files.

TuneUp will also show you when artists in your music library are coming to your location on tour, and it will show you related youtube videos and other interesting stuff.

There’s a free version that’s great for testing the application out, but I purchased the lifetime license for $29.95. There’s a yearly license available at $19.95 as well. TuneUp has been well worth the money. Even better, they have technical support folks that are very helpful. I had an issue with the installation of the free version (for some reason, it didn’t launch until I plugged my iPhone in – turns out that I had a corrupt iTunes Music Library file) and I sent in a support request. They got back to me in the timeframe they stated and were able to help me resolve the issue. One of the things that I consider to be part of the package is useful technical support, and TuneUp gets extra points for having that.

More information can be found at the TuneUp Media website.

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Make ringtones out of your own mp3s – free.

July 18th, 2009 by stuffaboutlife | Comments Off | Filed in Life, Technology


Really. I’ve used this website before to make ringtones for my BlackBerry. The overwhelming majority of the ‘get ringtones’ sites out there are actually expensive subscription services. They will give you a ‘free’ ringtone that they have already made, and next thing you know, you’re getting a $9.99 or $19.99 charge on your phone bill every month. Make Own Ringtone is not like that. It is not a subscription service. It’s an easy to use Flash based tool that will simply crop audio files that you already have and make them ringtone friendly.
Here’s a screenshot of what the tool looks like:
ringtone
You simply upload your files (mp3/aac/ogg and a few other formats) and edit them with the Flash tool, and then you can save it to your computer, send it to your phone, or have it emailed.

You can also do similar stuff with iTunes, but unless you have an iPhone, it’s a little more difficult to get them onto your phone. The basic concept is the same, and some directions on how to do it can be found here.

Stay away from the ‘subscription’ services because they can be really difficult to cancel, and there are other free (really, free!) alternatives out there.

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Pandora has been saved – for now.

July 8th, 2009 by stuffaboutlife | Comments Off | Filed in Technology

TechCrunch is reporting that the wonderful service called Pandora is off of the chopping block for now. They have reached an agreement with SoundExchange. The deal sounds like it’s going to be rather expensive any way you look at it, and I still think that the royalty issue has gotten way out of hand.
Pandora will still have the subscriptions, but they have curtailed the free users and are now limiting them to only 40 hours per month. If they hit 40 hours, they can pay $0.99 and be unlimited for the month. That’s not too bad at all. The regular Pandora subscriptions are well worth it. If I could use it in my car, I might just cancel my Sirius subscriptions entirely, since their rates have gone up again.

I absolutely love Pandora. At $36 a year even my poor self can afford it.

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NEAT: Sanyo R227 WiFi Internet Radio

July 3rd, 2009 by stuffaboutlife | Comments Off | Filed in Technology

I really want one of these. We don’t listen to ‘free radio’ anymore, but we do listen to a LOT of internet radio, and this looks like it would be the perfect device for the bedroom. I wish that we had run Ethernet throughout the house when we had it built, but the builders seemed confused by that request and we didn’t pursue it because we knew we’d have Wifi. Fortunately, the R227 has wifi as well. Neat!
R227

Does anybody have any experience with these?

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