I read your article with interest, as I recently also installed a music server and player at home. I admire how you managed to glue the NSLU2, the SoundBridge, and the various bits of software, but I think there is a much easier way, namely the Squeezebox: http://www.slimdevices.com/

After getting the Squeezebox, all I had to do was download SlimServer 6.2.1 (open source, and it also runs on the NSLU2), install it on my home server, and start it. Well, and I also had to get a modified boot script for SuSE Linux 10.0, from Slim Devices' forums (they have a rather helpful community), because the one the installer comes with doesn't work with SuSE.

After an uneventful setup, I was listening on my stereo to the music I had ripped in the previous weeks.

Even though my server (PIII 500, 384 MB) also runs NFS, NIS and HTTP services, the interface responsiveness, with no tweaks to slimserver, is remarkable. It's a bit slow only on occasion, especially when the automated daily backup starts. As for sound quality, I haven't had a single drop so far.

I did look into the Roku Labs SoundBridge, but its lack of support for ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats, would have meant having to do server-side transcoding (too CPU intensive for my humble server), and the transcoding would have to have been to wav format, which requires more bandwidth than FLAC (typical FLAC files are 40% smaller than the original PCM data).

Other factors that influenced my decision were the ease of installation (I already had a running Linux server with enough disk capacity), and the hackability of the SlimServer software (written in Perl).

Bernardo Rechea