Category: Radio

Logitech rules — or at least controls

Oh, the fun and frustration of technology in the home. We now have thirteen(!) devices in the house that depend upon, or use, the Internet.

I’ve come across another quirk with playback from Logitech’s Squeezebox music server. The good news is that Logitech has a PC client called SqueezePlay. The bad new is it’s beta code, and it shows. Squeezeplay lets you choose which Wi-Fi radio in your home network you want to control. The player called Neptune is the Chumby One in the kitchen.

The interface is a slightly modified Squeezebox Radio screen, which is very nice…

… but if it plays on the PC — and that’s a big if — it sometimes sounds almost like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music!

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/JAN/Squeezeplay.mp3]

When you don’t hear anything, that probably means control has reverted to the Squeezebox Radio. I assume Logitech can fix this, and I’d be delighted if they would help Chumby develop a Squeezebox UI, because their products really don’t compete directly with one another.

The Logitechal Song

As Wally Cleaver would say, I’ve been goofing around. The Logitech Squeezebox Radio is so good I was inspired to make a video to show how I have it set up. There’s no remote yet, so you get to see my hairy arm working the controls.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/DEC/Logitech.flv 512 384]

As I said in the video, turn it up and it gets loud. How loud? The meter shows 108 dB, and the sound is clear and solid.

Logitech Squeezebox Radio 108 dB

Something else I mentioned is the music server that’s in the basement. Logitech’s Squeezebox server is running on my spare computer, bought on the day Windows XP was released — October 25, 2001. The music is on a 160 GB USB drive that I outgrew on my primary Windows desktop.

Logitech Squeezebox Server

CD ripping is done with Windows Media Player 11. It’s set up for Carol’s convenience, so that all she has to do is open the tray and insert the disc. It rips and ejects automatically.

Daddy’s got a Squeezebox

Thanks to a couple of Christmas additions, Internet radio now rules. It comes with irony, because WBZ AM in Boston, at 64 Kbps, now sounds much better than the FM stations WBUR, streaming at 32k, and WGBH with its piddling shortwave-quality 24k. [Note: Two days after I posted this item, WBUR went to 64K, and a few weeks later WGBH did likewise.]

I’m tickled to have BBC Radio 2 as a preset in the bedroom on the Logitech Squeezebox Radio. Santa delivered it from Amazon, but it’s on sale this week at Best Buy for the same $150 price. I have quibbles with the buttons that could have been prevented by making the navigation knob a bit smaller, but other than that — and a couple of lock-ups that came up when I was flipping between menus rather abruptly — I give the Squeezebox Radio a rave recommendation.

The other Wifi radio is a fun, but quirky, device in the kitchen called a Chumby One. Being much more demanding to set up than the Logitech, the Chumby is a techie’s delight, but it is not a consumer-friendly product, and its $120 price makes the Squeezebox a better deal when it’s on sale; however, the Chumby is more than an Internet radio.

At first I was worried about the Squeezebox not having a regular FM tuner, but the Chumby One’s tuner is next to useless, and because I installed a battery there’s no place to store the antenna, so I’m actually considering cutting it off. But now that I’ve had a couple of days to enjoy Internet radio that’s been freed from the need for a full-blown computer, I’m OK with letting go of broadcast AM and FM radio.

Roku expands offerings

Anybody in the U.S. who uses Netflix but doesn’t have a Netflix player for connection to a TV is really missing out. There are now a lot of Netflix-compatible devices. The one that I use, and love, is the Roku player.

Netflix seems to be on top of the movie game, and I think the industry has no choice but to deal with Reed Hastings and his vision of the future, the way Steve Jobs forced the music industry out of digital indecision. But I’m not on iTunes, in part because there are so many other options for music, especially for casual listening.

Roku offers services besides Netflix, and last night I took an update that enabled a bunch of additional channels. The one that caught my eye — actually, my ear — is the Pandora music service. A year ago I started using TheRadio.com, and it’s good, but I have to give the nod to Pandora, now that it’s on the Roku player. I want to hear everything that Elvis Costello has done that I don’t own, and Pandora makes that possible. I assume Costello gets money in the process, so everybody wins.

Another new Roku option is Revision3, with videos about tech topics. Looks promising. One of Revision3’s channels is Film Riot, where a guy named Ryan, who has some of Leonard Maltin’s mannerisms, teaches videography. Ryan’s latest entry features Popeye, which I liked, and I was impressed that he got into some history by talking about a technical innovation invented by Max Fleischer nearly a century ago.

Mediafly, sort of a news aggregator, is the only other Roku channel I wanted to try. Mediafly is rather rough around the edges, and not only is it slow to come up, there seems to be a bug that causes occasional lockups. Sometimes these are local to Mediafly, but sometimes they affect everything else on the player, and a restart is needed.

“I know it’s America here… I’ve noticed.”

The Beatles flood continues. In a perfect world, when the Beatles arrived in the United States for the first time they would have been followed by a film crew. What’s that? They were?? Incredible!

[MEDIA=62]

There’s a lot more footage available on YouTube, but here are ten interesting minutes I’ve edited, starting with their arrival on Friday, and ending when they left the Plaza Hotel suite on Sunday for CBS studios, and their famous appearance on Ed Sullivan’s variety show.

  • At the airport press conference John says “we need money first” before they can sing. Later, Paul and Ringo seem to have no recollection of John’s quip.
  • The reporters took the Beatles as a joke. It seems silly now that their hair was such a big deal.
  • The boys appeared excited seeing themselves on TV.
  • Walter Cronkite can be heard closing his CBS broadcast with news of the Beatles’ visit. Cronkite was one of the first American newscasters to feature the Beatles in 1963.
  • The boys seemed genuinely tired from jet lag, discussing the time difference and the prospect of going out later. A hard day’s night.
  • John really was very cutting when he felt he was suffering fools. Murray “the K” Kaufman, with his toupee, had no idea that “wacker” meant “a stupid person.”
  • “Cyn” is, of course, John’s wife Cynthia. She’s told to watch Channel 2 at 8.
  • John plays around with a mouth organ. Three years later, the tune would become the opening to “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
  • Love the Pepsi transistor radios.

Classical oldies in Boston

For all of my emphasis on Pop music, half of my CD collection is Classical. A few years ago, Boston’s commercial radio station with Classical music, WCRB, switched frequencies to a weaker signal to make way for a Country music station. Today there’s the news that the other Boston radio station with Classical music, non-commercial WGBH, is buying WCRB.

I don’t know what to make of this move. There’s no obvious logic behind it, except perhaps a strategy to consolidate Classical music on Boston’s airwaves to ensure its survival. It’s estimated that a successful Classical CD sells only about 5,000 copies. (The same is supposedly true of Blues and Jazz recordings.)

WGBH, which is one of the country’s premiere PBS TV stations, has been mismanaged for some years. It built an obnoxiously luxurious new studio with an ill-advised, and unreliable, giant TV that faces the Mass Pike. And now the overhead of financing and operating the new facility is dragging down WGBH. The radio station is the much smaller part of the organization, and it’s always had a mixed format that switches to Jazz in the evening, through the night.

If ‘GBH uses ‘CRB as its Classical music outlet, I’m not sure what it can do with its frequency, other than to try to expand its news offerings. But another public radio station, WBUR, which itself was mismanaged in the past, already has that covered.

With the underground station WBCN now gone, Boston radio is really in turmoil. Through all of this, the only station that I listen regularly, that keeps on keeping on, is WBZ-AM. And earlier this year ‘BZ made the huge mistake of letting go of overnight talk show host Steve LeVeille, then having to reverse that decision thanks to listener outrage.