Cool Squeezebox thing. On Windows, my Slimserver interface is an .exe. On Linux, it’s a browser page. I open Firefox and type “http://bigbend:9000″ (”bigbend” is what I named my server) and the Slimserver software comes up as a webpage. I can control the Squeezebox from the Office PC or from Al’s laptop since she’s on the same network. (To be fair, I think the web interface is possible when running Slimserver under Windows, too, but it’s not the default interface and you have to know to look for it). The software isn’t as good as iTunes, but it’s very good for creating playlists on the fly and changing the queue. I’ve even read that I could do true remote control and set it up so that I could access the player from work or from Richmond. Other than scaring Cadbury, though, I don’t see the usefulness.
I’m had been thinking that my way around the lossless AAC problem is to abandon AAC entirely. From what I’ve read online, Windows Media Player’s lossless format is at least as good as Apple’s. Most people say that they’re comparable and some say that Windows’ is better. I did a quick compare and found no great difference. Open source denizens tout FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). Essentially a lossless codec that isn’t owned by Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else. I see the usefulness of that for future-proofing. But the process sounds painful. Convert the CD to a .wav file and feed it through an encoder. Ugh. I’m not that much of a perfectionist.
Anyway, I tried it, and the Slimserver can’t recognize WMA, either. I understand it. Linux is free (as I’ve paraphrased from O’Reilly and otehrs: free as in beer, as well as free as in speech). Anyway, because it’s free & open, they’re limited on what non-free, non-open code they can include. Licensing and royalty issues. And Microsoft and Apple’s WMA and AAC codecs are proprietary.
It’s not undoable. There are free codecs that will get the job done. I just have to find them and apply them correctly. As I’m mentioned before, installing Linux software isn’t always as easy as double-clicking an .exe. But that’s okay.
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