The software (SqueezeCenter V7)
The controller and receiver will only work with SqueezeCenter V7 software (formerly SlimServer). Notice how everything revolves around the Squeeze nomenclature - clever or annoying, you decide.
For some while, I'd been using my two Squeezebox 3s, with SlimServer 6.5.4 running on my Thecus N5200Pro. However, I had to install SqueezeCenter 7 on my media box to get these two new devices working.
But SC7 hasn't gone gold yet - the company is keeping it in beta until the very last moment, so this should be the most stable and functional server release to date from the Mountain View team.
At first glance, SC7 doesn't seem to be that much different from SS6.5.x. However, there really there have been some massive changes.
- The whole plugin system has changed, so plugin errors should no longer take down the whole server
- The system for catching and reporting errors has been overhauled - and so has the logging and de-bugging
- The new interface is much more than just a new skin. There's been lots of re-organisation and most elements have become Web2.0 and dynamic
- The music scanner has been spun off into a separate application. This means that the main interface is still responsive during scanning. Scanner status and progress are also reported, so you now can see what it's doing and get an idea of how long that's going to take
- SqueezeNetwork is now integrated with SqueezeCenter. I've not played with the integration as yet but most player settings are transferred between the two. So, for example, even when your SqueezeCenter is turned off, your favourite Internet radio stations are still available - and time/date formats are the same. I hope that alarms are sync'd as well, that will be neat to play with
- Player synchronisation is vastly improved, too. All the Slim hardware players (right the way back to the SliMP3) and the Java SoftSqueeze should now sync and remain sync'd perfectly.
In addition, there have been many smaller changes with SC7 but I'll pass over those for now.
There are also features that have been held over until V7.1 or later. For instance, there are plans to be able to install plugins and skins through the web interface but they've not yet been implemented.
SC7 now has a pretty cool wizard interface that launches after first install. As with the rest of the SC7, the whole wizard is web-based but it is nicely designed, fast and uses a fair amount of AJAX/Web2.0 code.
After SC7 is installed and started, this window opens
My music resides on a NAS, so I manually enter the UNC pack name in the box at the bottom. There was a problem with using mapped drive in Windows with previous versions of SlimServer. This may be solved now but, as that drive isn't mapped on the
server I'm using, I'll stick to direct path names.
I wish there were an Advanced button on the above page because the SC7 launches straight into scanning your library and will often use the wrong settings, well it does for me.
By default, multi-disc albums are treated as separate discs, so it thinks I have 1,300-plus albums when that's actually just the number of discs I have. In reality there should be 1,172. However, I'm pretty sure there's an enhancement request for this logged in the Slim Devices Bugzilla.
In the shot above, library scanning is taking place and I haven't pointed any players to it yet, so there isn't anything exciting going on.
Note that if you have a lot of playlists, the time taken could be much longer than 30 minutes because the scan will verify that all the linked tracks are valid before making them available. All the information being gleaned during my scan was being pulled from the NAS across my gigabit network.