Bye Squeezebox. Was nice knowing you. Mostly. For a while.

I bought a squeezebox boom about 18 months ago. At the time I loved it. It streamed my music from my internal music source (a Netgear Nas device which had the squeezeserver software preinstalled). The music quality was “dead good” and both the unit and the tiny remote were lovely and responsive.

Fast forward those 18 months, and:

• spotify has been released for a couple of the squeezebox devices - just not mine.
• the remote has stopped working completely
• through a number of software revisions the server software has got slower
• the hardware glitches and freezes at least once every couple of weeks
• it loses the wi-fi signal on a monthly basis

So, yesterday I went out and replaced my squeezebox (almost). Not with a Sonos which would be the logical choice, but with an Apple Airport Express (that’s the almost, I plugged it into the squeezeboxes line-in). In the 24 hours since the purchase I’ve vaguely and kinda and definitely fallen in love with the simplicity of the thing - not only can I now stream tunes from my Macbook Pro to my music player (with startlingly quick response times), but my iPhone can stream to the thing too! Bloody brilliant.

I plan on retrieving my Bose speakers from the office and connecting them up to it instead of the Squeezebox, but the awesomeness of the Airport Express, I can’t get over - I’ve seen them on the Apple website for at least the last year and wondered what the hell they were for - seems they’re for being awesome.

Anyone want a squeezebox? ;)