Squeezebox

Today's question: What's the best way to stream MP3s from my computer upstairs to my stereo downstairs? (my life seems to be beset with these sorts of problems)

Here are the network music player requirements that I was forced to work with:

1. It needs to connect wirelessly to my 802.11g network
2. It must support WPA-PSK encryption
3. It should have S/PDIF digital audio outputs
4. It should be super-easy to use once set up (minimal work required to turn the music on and off)

The first thing I tried out was an Airport Express with Airtunes from Apple. It aced the first 3 requirements, and I figured that nothing else would score better on #4. Unfortunately I was wrong on the last one.

The problem with Airtunes is that it just pretends to be a set of "remote speakers" and requires a computer to be running iTunes all the time to play the music. I ended up with two options:

1. Leave the computer upstairs on all the time playing music (easier now that I have a Mac Mini Media Center). This worked, but in order to switch songs or playlists I had to run upstairs and switch them on the computer, which was annoying.
2. Run iTunes on a laptop downstairs and play the music from there. This worked if I was already using the laptop, but if I was just eating breakfast I would have to go over to the laptop, wake it up, type in my password, find iTunes and hit play. Then when I was leaving I had to walk back over, stop iTunes and sleep the laptop. Far too complicated.

The only other network music player I could find that fulfilled the first 3 requirements was a Squeezebox (and only the very newest model supports WPA). It works by streaming the MP3 files from a network server and playing them directly. It also has a remote that can be used to browse the music collection on its big LCD and (most importantly) the ability to start & stop playback with one button push. It also runs its own web server so you can manage which music is playing from any computer on the network (including a cell phone).

It was pretty much exactly what I needed. Here's a picture of it in action:

And here's the back:

It has a headphone port, analogue RCA stereo jacks, optical and coax S/PDIF jacks, and an ethernet port (for wireless network bridging, also very handy).

So far it works great. Setting it up was the only difficult part. Typing in the 256-bit WPA key with the remote was very painful, especially since it kept crashing with a helpful "malloc failed" error message and rebooting, forcing me to start over. But, now that I have that all sorted out I haven't had any problems with it.