In a Wireless World, Hearing Is Believing

The appeal of a wireless media receiver -- a box plugged into your stereo to play the music saved on your computer -- got a simple demonstration after I recently moved. I had dozens of boxes to open and unpack and needed a soundtrack for the work, but all the CDs were still imprisoned in cardboard.

Fortunately, I had already set up the stereo, the computers and the WiFi access point. All I had to do was plug in two media receivers that I'd been testing, Apple's AirPort Express and Slim Devices' Squeezebox, and I had my digital-music library blasting through the speakers.

But unlike my earlier experiences with this type of hardware, these two devices actually worked, more or less, out of the box. The AirPort Express and the Squeezebox have their faults, but they get most of the basic tasks done; if you could just combine their best parts, the results would be close to perfect.

I tried the Squeezebox first, a $279 black box with a small antenna for its 802.11b WiFi receiver, plus analog and digital audio-output jacks to connect to a stereo. (A $199 version supports only wired networks.)

Setting it up involved installing its SlimServer software on my computers -- it runs on Win 98 or newer, Mac OS X and Linux and is also available as source code for use on other platforms. After this software is loaded, you'll need to let it index your music collection; when you add or remove a song from a computer, you must repeat this chore, since SlimServer can't track those changes automatically.

Then I used the Squeezebox's remote to point it to my wireless network (a relatively straightforward process, except for the irritating labor of typing out a 26-character WiFi encryption key on the remote's numeric keypad).

The Squeezebox never dropped a connection when networked to a Mac desktop. But it failed with numbing regularity when paired with a Windows laptop, even when I moved both devices to a friend's wireless network.

I've heard from enough happy Squeezebox owners to think that this problem must be rare. Still, you'd do well to give this thing a thorough test before its vendor's 30-day money-back guarantee expires.

The Squeezebox plays MP3 and Windows Media Audio music files, as well as the MP3 streams broadcast by many Web radio stations. The SlimServer software can also read AAC files created by Apple's iTunes program, but since it sends them to a Squeezebox as bandwidth-hogging uncompressed audio, don't expect reliable play over WiFi.

Slim Devices' system doesn't accept song downloads bought at such stores as iTunes, Wal-Mart or Napster. This isn't Slim Devices' fault -- this Mountain View, Calif., firm (www.slimdevices.com) has yet to get the necessary programming information from Apple and Microsoft, the creators of those sites' copy-controlled music formats -- but it's still a major hindrance.