The 160GB capacity would be the same as my current iPod Classic, which is liveable; but, the lack of physical playback buttons (meaning dependance on on-screen controls) is a much bigger issue for me. I wouldn’t mind having a corded remote that provide some kind of playback control. Heck, some of the portable MiniDisc recorders that I have from a quite a while ago included such a remote and even included a small LCD display! No, I am not planning on going back to MiniDiscs for portable music; partially, because I haven’t charged the Ni-MH batteries in years and, thus not be portable.

The iAudio X7 does have some nice features, including support for stereo output via Bluetooth and FM radio. It also includes a line-in cable so that I can, one day, finish transferring decades-old folk music from tapes to a digital format. Right now, my plan would be to use an old Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 that also has line-in and record each side to a single WAV file. With the Cowon player, I would be limited to a lossy format.

According to Cowon, the player can play audio for up to 103 hours continuously on a full battery. I doubt if that will be the case when playing a large mix of FLAC or MP3 files encoded at 320Kbps. I would be happy if my iPod Classic could last for more than 1.03 minutes on battery! I’m considering sending in my iPod Classic to a company that will swap out the battery with a new one, as it would be cheaper than sending it to Apple for the same procedure.

Will I be running out to get the Cowon iAudio X7 immediately? No, mostly because I can’t find anyone selling one in the United States. I still have reservations about the touch screen interface and not excited with the lack of an increase of capacity. Another concern would be in terms of price. Right now, it is available in the UK for £249 and probably would probably cost north of $300-325 once it reaches these shores.

Why FLAC and ALAC? I chose FLAC since it is a lossless and open format, in which I can treat each FLAC file as an archive-worthy copy that so happens to contain ReplayGain data. Not to mention, it’s perfect for listening to music in my living room through my Squeezebox or one of my Sennheiser headphones (HD570 and HD580). Now, it may seem redundant to have FLAC and ALAC copies floating around, but it’s necessary because Apple decided to go with ALAC as their sole lossless format for iTunes and their iPods.

All said, in order to carry around a good selection of music and podcasts (including every Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show made available as a podcast, Car Talk, This American Life), I need something has a storage capacity of at least 120GB. My current 160GB iPod Classic does the deed fairly well… except for the fact that I can’t play FLAC files on it (I know about RockBox, but my iPod Classic is not supported). I’m also at the point where I would like to carry around more podcasts and more albums in a lossless format, preferably in FLAC format.

So, I’ve been looking around for a better alternative and one that has a 250GB (or larger) hard drive. Unfortunately, it is slim pickin’s and not many do a good job of handling dynamic or on-the-go playlists. I know there are flash memory based players out there that can take 32GB Micro-SDHC cards and support FLAC, but that would require a lot of card swapping and would lead to long load times and playlist management nightmare. I’m kind of dealing with that right now with two 32GB SDHC cards for my S5, but instead of swapping out cards (as the head unit has two SD/SDHC slots), I have to switch between sources and playlists cannot span across slots.

I have also considered giving up on using a lossless format for portable use, but that’s a compromise that I’m not willing to make right now. I would really like to make good use of my audio setup in my S5 and “dumbing” down to 256kbps MP3 just doesn’t feel quite right.

I know there isn’t a huge market for hard drive based portable media players, particularly ones that support FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. Everything is moving towards flash memory (internal or with swappable memory cards), due to form factor, weight and battery life. Unfortunately, that has the side effect of relatively lower capacity, or moderately large capacity at much higher prices (iPod Touch, anyone?).

Until a better iPod Classic or similar device arrives, I’ll have to slog around with my iPod Classic and its waning battery.

All that I can say is that the new introduction and theme for the new Doctor Who series (Series 5, Series 1, New Series, or whatever it is called) seems to have lost touch with its predecessors. While there still is the TARDIS zooming through the Time Vortex, as seen in Series 1 through 4 (Ninth and Tenth Doctors), and the base melody is there; but it does not seem to have the same depth and oomph as the one for Series 4.

The only thing I like about the new intro is that the TARDIS in the new logo morphs into the TARDIS and continues to zoom through the time vortex.

Maybe it will grow on me like the Series 4 theme, but only time will tell.

I also tried using my XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 consoles to stream my music, but again, neither natively handle Ogg Vorbis and FLAC audio tracks. Also, I didn’t want to have to turn my television on to see what was playing nor wanted to deal with the not-so-brilliant IR/line-of-sight Xbox 360 Universal Media Remote.

So I was doing some research and narrowed my search down to the Squeezebox and the Roku Soundbridge. My choice came down to what audio formats are supported natively by the device, the overall quality of the unit (both physically and in terms of audio quality). I also noticed that Slim Devices was discounting the white wireless Squeezebox by $50, which also with the good reviews of the unit, clenched it for me. Sure, I don’t have anything white in my audio stack, but the rest of my A/V setup is color co-ordinated anyway (my XBOX 360 and Wii are white, the Playstation 3 and GameCube are black, the Super Nintendo, original NES, the front of the XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive and the Playstation are shades of gray, and I have a gold Nintendo 64).

After a couple of days, I received the Squeezebox and started the setup process by installing the Slim Server software on my file server running FreeBSD (which was as simple as running “portinstall slimserver”). Once the software was installed, I created a DHCP reservation and DNS entry for the device, then started the setup process on the Squeezebox itself. Once I entered in the information for my wireless network using WPA2 Personal (if I had a long enough network cable and a spare switch port, I would have connected it to my wired network), it picked up the Slim Server and was ready to go.

At first, I decided to connect the Squeezebox to the external DSP using a digital coax cable, had the Slim Server scan a couple of my albums and concert DVDs in FLAC format, then started playing the songs. The overall volume was a bit quieter than the audio coming out of the line out from my iPod, which I was able to control decently with the external DSP. But after skipping through a couple of songs, I noticed that the DSP had made some clicking noises. After some testing, I noticed that it would happen when transitioning between songs with different sample rates (audio CDs have a sample rate of 44.1KHz while the concert DVDs that I had converted to FLAC all use a sample rate of 48KHz). Also, there was a fair amount of white noise that was introduced by the DSP, which was a bit annoying during quiet spots, which is not a fault of the Squeezebox, so I am not dinging it for that in any way.

So I unplugged the audio cable for my iPod dock to the receiver and plugged in my Squeezebox over analog. Again, the volume coming out of the Squeezebox was a tad low, but workable (I just need to remember to lower the volume before switching over to the FM tuner for listening to OPB, but more on that later). The audio quality using the analog output was very close to the digital outpiut, just without the extra white noise introduced by the DSP.

The included remote has a very nice feel to it, the buttons have a nice and subtle tactic feel when pressed and does not require absolute line-of-sight in order for it to work. Even though the remote is quite nice, the web interface for the Slim Server is absolutely great. The Fishbone skin provides a detachable window that shows the “Now Playing” information, in addition to volume controls and basic controls for skipping, stopping and pausing. Of course, I don’t need to use the web interface often to see what is currently playing, as the display on the Squeezebox itself is readable from almost any distance. I even decided to mimick the product shots on Slim Devices web site by adding Pink Martini’s Veronique to the Now Playing playlist :)

Product Shot:

Squeezebox playing Pink Martini's "Veronique"

The web interface is where the bulk of the configuration, music management and additional features are presented and managed. Once the Slim Server is told where to look for music and scans the files, you can browse through the music by artist, album, genre and year, as well as browsing the directory structure. You can also use it to configure the various Random playing options, which provides the ability to include or exclude genres (I don’t exactly want one of my Car Talk podcast tracks to play in the middle of a decent mix set).

Slim Server Web Interface:

Web interface for the Squeezebox and Slim Server

In order to limit the amount of music that is scanned and presented to the Slim Server, I created a basic directory structure on my file server and used symlinks to point to directories or individual files that I want to be scanned. Else, I would probably have numerous duplicates (since I have some CDs and concert DVDs copied in MP3 and FLAC format, and some on ALAC format as well; even though I split out each format in their own directory; i.e.: storage/MP3s, storage/FLAC, storage/ALAC). Up until recently, I didn’t “tag” my FLAC files with album art, so I placed an image file in each album directory and configured the Slim Server to look for that filename).

As I hinted to earlier, I use my Squeezebox to listen to OPB Radio and other Internat radio stations streamed over the Internet (though it does not seem to play the OPB Music stream, which is a slight disappointment). The audio quality for streaming Internet radio is dependent on the quality of the stream itself, with the OPB Radio stream coming close to the FM channel for most programs (music programs like “Thistle and Shamrock” and others are a bit lackluster due to the low bitrate).

In terms of audio file formats, it was able to play my music collection that I copied from my CDs in MP3 format with varying bitrates (256kbps CBR, 320kbps CBR, 260-280kbps ABR/VBR), all of the FLAC files that I have, as well as decode several albums in Apple Lossless Audio Codec (which I transcoded from the FLAC files I have so I can at least have decent audio quality for my iPod while at work) after I installed the appropriate decoder package. There has not any problems with streaming the audio over my wireless network yet, as the signal quality stays within the 60-75% signal strength zone.

Would I go back to using my iPod, XBOX 360 or Playstation 3 as music players or streamers in my living room again? No (unless if I start building an SACD collection), as the Squeezebox has been able to handle everything that I have thrown at it (with the one exception of the OPB Music stream).

Was it worth the discounted $249 price? Absolutely! Even if the $50 discount was available on the white wireless model, I would have paid the regular $299 price.

It isn’t without its quirks though, I’ve had the Now Playing track display not update both on the Squeezebox and in the web interface when it switches to a new song. Also, the Slim Server software does not natively handle “smart” playlists so that I can build out playlists by artists or genres.

Of course, during the past couple of weeks, I have been re-copying the CDs and concert DVDs that I listen to often into 320kbps CBR and FLAC format, the former for iPod and the latter for the Squeezebox and the digital jukebox in my car… which leads to figuring out if there are any more CDs that I should have in FLAC format, etc.

Having been blue over the past several days, it gave me a chance to expand the list of depressing songs and why I find them depressing. The new additions include:

• Matchbox Twenty: Unwell and Bed of Lies
• Lifehouse: Everything

As well as a couple of songs by Barenaked Ladies.

Now that I have a Squeezebox in the living room, it is much easier to queue up depressing songs on-demand. At this point, I do not know if that is a blessing or a curse. (by the way, a brief review of the device is coming up in the next week or two.)