Tag: logitech squeezebox touch

Squeezeboxed Out

Sorry to say, all of the nitty-picky audio stuff I mentioned yesterday isn’t the whole story. I was hoping to ignore the rest of it, but now I can’t.

First, I should point out that Logitech stopped selling its Squeezebox players over ten years ago. Since then the SiriusXM and Amazon Music apps have disappeared, and support for streaming AAC audio was ended. Yet it’s to Logitech’s credit the technology is still working at all. A couple of days ago, this message appeared on my two Logitech Squeezebox Radios, and on the Squeezebox Touch.

Somebody did something to the Squeezebox service at Logitech, but everything was working and all was well at mysqueezebox.com.

The word “upgrade” made me wonder if an updated service was available to download, even though the Logitech Media Server console said there wasn’t one. Yup, I was running v3.8.0, and there was v3.8.1. (The reference to Revue doesn’t apply to me.)

After downloading and installing the new server code, error messages began appearing about missing DLL files. Being System-level messages, they stay in the foreground until closed. But other than the annoying messages on the old netbook that’s running LMS, and the messages on the devices, everything was working. So okay, fine, leave well enough alone.

Then, this morning, the messages saying the players were not authorized to use mysqueezebox.com were gone! Yay! Somebody did something to the Squeezebox service at Logitech. The messages about the missing DLL files remain, but I’m fine with that. However, back at Logitech, somebody was doing something again. Everything would work for a while and then fail again, because the mysqueezebox service was disappearing. So they’re rebooting there, and I’ll reboot the players again and ignore them for the rest of the morning. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to this story!

Update: 12 o’clock and all is not well. I feel like I’m back at work again, troubleshooting a problem.

The Squeezebox radios work for a while, then they go offline until being restarted. If I leave them offline and check the status of the mysqueezebox service, there’s a DNS error. After restarting, the IP address for mysqueezebox.com keeps changing. I have never seen that before. Curiously, although the Touch player also shows the rotating IP addresses, it doesn’t go offline. Neither does the Squeezeplay program, a virtual Touch player. Its DNS resolution is being handled by Windows.

I’ll probably have to resort to the slimdevices forum, which I was hoping to avoid. As with all user forums, there’s a lot of speculation by people who don’t actually know anything. Even if they’re knowledgeable, they aren’t necessarily in a position to do anything about problems at Logitech.

Update: I’m the April Fool, and the joke’s on me. After putting in a lot of work yesterday, I figured out the problem, and even thought I had it fixed with a patch. But today I woke up to bricked radios. Logitech now requires media server 8.3, and the Logitech radios have incompatible 7.7.3 firmware that cannot be updated. There is a patch that is supposed to get around the problem, but it doesn’t work. The Logitech Touch has compatible 7.8 firmware and, despite the warning shown above, it still works. As does the Squeezeplay program, with virtual firmware 7.8.

Other than that, I’m giving up and saying Goodbye to my Logitech Squeezebox Radios.

Yes It Is Something

I am annoyed that Logitech has discontinued its superb Squeezebox Touch music player. I’d be even more annoyed if I didn’t own one. Playing on the Touch right now is, for me, the ultimate expression of audio technology as it presently exists — The complete Beatles on an Apple USB flash drive. The customer reviews on Amazon are all over the place, and I am very pleased to say you can ignore all of them that aren’t five stars. (No, I didn’t have a problem with the stem, as others have reported. The drive is secured magnetically, and maybe that’s given some people trouble.)

This thing is worth every penny, and maybe I’m just giddy because I applied all of my Amex Rewards Points to the purchase and got it for only $18, as a birthday present to myself, but the sound quality is what it is, and it’s absolutely outstanding. I’ve never been carried away with the sound of most — and I mean 75% or more — Compact Discs. I have never thought that digital audio was the problem, but that 16 bits aren’t enough. The dynamic range of CD is great, but so is the contrast ratio between solid white and solid black. The fine shades of gray — the nuances — often seem to be missing. Cymbals, for example, lack the shimmer they should have. Acoustic guitars don’t quite convey the feeling of the strings vibrating. Etc.

Despite my advancing age, my ears still seem to be good up to 12 kHz, maybe even 14 kHz, and listening to the Beatles this way is really something. With CD’s, when music gets loud, with a lot of instruments and vocals, I think everything sort of collapses into a flat-sounding mess, and I lose interest. The Beatles collection, copied from the original 24-bit digital masters, and compressed in the lossless FLAC format, doesn’t do that. Every little thing can be discerned distinctly and easily.

For sure, this is a specialty item for the very few with a lot of interest and the right setup, but at last there’s something better for listening to the Fab Four than the Mobile Fidelity LP’s from 30 years ago (I have a few titles, but not the box set). Enough talk. I’m going back to listening!