Getting There From Here

It's getting harder and harder to get excited about new technology these days. A new IPod? Boring. Oh sure, the new one is tall and thin while the old one was short and fat, but frankly, who cares? A new IPhone? Kind of exciting, but the Iphone's been out a while now, and everybody's doing the touch screen thing these days.

However, every now and then a new device can still come along and get you surprised and excited. Every now and then, something comes along and changes everything, and you wonder almost immediately "how did I ever get along with out this?" That's my blog tonight, because I got this new device last week and I just can't stop playing with it. It truly is one of those technological wonders that changes everything.

What happened is I bought new radio. Sure, radio's been around for about 100 years and the technology can hardly be called "new", and yet this new radio of mine is something entirely different. It's called the Squeezebox Boom and it's made by a company called Logitech (maybe you have one of their mice?). What's different about this radio is that it's entirely different. You see, it doesn't get it's signals from over-the-air broadcast stations or satellites - it gets them from the internet.

That's right - No AM or FM. It has a built-in wifi antenna, and it connects to the computer network you already have in your home or office (it also has an ethernet port for regular wired connections). Just plug it in, configure it, and now instead of having a few dozen radio stations to listen to, you have hundreds, if not thousands, to choose from.

I brought mine home and had it up and running in about 20 minutes. There were a few glitches in the setup, but nothing that anyone with basic computer skills couldn't handle. The first glitch was that when I powered on the radio all the menus were in german. I don't know why that was, but eventually I found the menu selection to change the default language to english. My next problem was that for some reason the radio couldn't find my network. It found a few of my neighbors wireless networks, but it didn't list mine among them. Fortunately, the setup offered the option to manually input my network and, once done, I had no problem connecting.

After connecting to the network, the next step was to create an account at a place called the SqueezeNetwork. You use the SqueezeNetwork to configure your radio, and account setup is free. When you setup your SqeezeNetwork account, you enter in your radio's PIN number and that ties your online account to your particular radio. Once everything is setup, your all ready to go. From then on, the website is the place you'll go to configure the services that you use on your radio (usernames and passwords), and it's these services that will deliver the content to your radio.

The free services offered on SqueezeNetwork are LastFM, Live365, Pandora, Radiotime, and Slacker. The subscription services offered are MP3tunes, RadioIO, Rhapsody and Sirius. I won't go into detail for each option, but they all deliver music in one way or another to your radio. In addition to the services, the Sqeezebox Boom can also play Shoutcast streams, podcasts, and, with the appropriate software installed on your home computer, can even stream music stored on your hard drive directly to the radio. What the radio can't do is play over-the-air stations, but using Radiotime you can probably listen to most of your favorite local stations over the internet (more on that later).

So how does it all work? Let me use Pandora as an example. By logging on to the SqueezeNetwork website, I was able to set up a free Pandora account. Once I had it set up, Pandora instantly became available on my radio. The next step was to go to the Pandora website and set up a custom radio station. I'm kind of an opera fan, so when Pandora asked me for the name of an artist I'd like to use as a basis for my radio station I entered Renee Fleming. Pandora then went through it's database and created a station that would play both Renee Fleming tracks and other artists that it considered similar to Renee Fleming. As soon as I had created that station, it was instantly available on my radio. Now when I want to listen to my station, I simply select it on the radio and it streams the tracks directly from Pandora to my radio. I don't need to enter any url's or passwords into the radio, I simply tell it to play and the music starts playing. Pandora also allows the user to rate the tracks it plays so and I can do that with the radio as well. In theory this will allow Pandora to fine tune the station to my tastes, but I like pretty much all of the tracks they play anyways.

(LastFM also allows the user to rate tracks. I haven't found LastFM's selections to be nearly as dead-on as Pandora's so this is particularly useful. However, when you tell LastFM that you like a track, it displays a message which says "You have loved this track". Frankly, that's a level of intimacy I'm not sure I'm prepared to have with my radio).

You can set up mulitiple stations at Pandora, and I have created a half dozen so far. The Squeezebox lists all of them and it's a simple matter to select the one I want to listen to. Of course, Pandora is just one of the services I use. Radiotime provides a listing of over-the-air radio stations that stream their content over the internet. Many radio stations do that nowdays, and all you do here is tell Radiotime your zip code and it comes back with a list of local radio stations that stream. I didn't do an exact count, but I'd say most of my local stations are listed. Once again, once Radiotime has been set up at the SqueezeNetwork website, my Squeezebox radio has the list all ready to go. I simply scroll through the list, find the station I want to listen to, and select it.

Very easy...

Anyway, those are just two of the services you can use. If you combine all the services and shoutcasts and podcasts available, you can end up with hundreds of choices. The radio also gives you the option of tagging some of your stations as favorites. That way you don't have to wade through all the choices each time, and six preset buttons are available on the radio itself to provide one button access to your favorites (they work exactly like the presets on your car radio).

I'm both a Sirius and a Rhapsody subscriber as well, so that also gives me even more options. Sirius and Rhapsody are paid services, so that may discourage some people from using them. However, if you can afford them they really add to what's possible with the radio. Rhapsody is an especially nice option since it makes it possble for me to access any song or CD in the Rhapsody database as well. Do I feel like listening to an old Alice Cooper CD? Well, all I have to do is find it and play it.

Very nice...

Obviously I can't go through all the ways that you can use the radio - there's simply too much to go through. Instead I should probably talk about how the radio sounds. Well, it sounds pretty good - not as good as one of those Bose tabletop radios, but definitely not tinny or underpowered either. The treble and bass are both adjustable, but there is no graphic equalizer. Using just the treble and bass settings, though, I was able to get a good rich sound out of the radio (a connector is provided for an optional subwoofer, if needed). The radio also has an "XL" feature which allows the sound field to be expanded if you want, and I found that does a pretty good job of enhancing the stereo effect. Some people don't like it, but I do.

There is also and alarm with snooze button, and the alarm is configurable for different days and times. For example, you can configure the alarm to go off at 6:00 am on Mondays through Fridays, and maybe 9:00 on Saturdays and not at all on Sundays, or whatever. A line-in port is also included if you want to hook up an Ipod or something like that, and it also has a headphone port for private listening. I paid $300.00 for it, and that includes the radio, power brick, patch cable, and remote (with battery).

What's my final verdict? This radio changes everything. It's not the only internet radio out there these days, but I don't have any others so I don't know how it compares. All I can say is that for a music lover, this is the device to have. Instead of only having one or two stations that I really like, I now have dozens, even ones that I custom make myself. I now have Sirius radio in my home without having to fuss with trying to get a line-of-sight connection to a satellite. I now have Rhapsody on my radio so that I can search for any song or CD in their library and play it. It's almost an embarrassment of riches.

The only drawback is that I can't get one of these for my car. That would be the ultimate place for internet radio, but for now it's simply not possible. However, if you're looking for a new radio for your home or office (and you have a kindly IT person that will let you connect it to his or her network), then don't get one of those over-the-air types. I'm telling 'ya, those things are now officially obselete, and it doesn't take much imagination to see where the future of television lies.

Maybe not soon, but someday.