Posted on February 10, 2008 in Gadgets, Music by Ben Coleman2 Comments »

You may recall some time ago that the nice people at Logitech sent me a beta preview of their new Squeezebox remote control. I was so chuffed I blogged about it. But now they’ve gone one better, and sent me a new base station unit and another remote. Again these are beta/preview devices (but they work perfectly). This is the new model replacing the old Squeezebox 3 and is called the Squeezebox Duet. As you can see they’ve removed the screen from the base unit and put a colour screen into the controller. The base unit connects wirelessly (or through a CAT5 cable) to the network and has both digital & stereo phono outputs on the back. Set-up was a doddle and it was up and running in no time. They seemed to have ironed out the bugs on the controller and browsing through your music is easy and with all the album art displayed it looks good too. The server behind it all - now called SqueezeCenter is much improved over the old Slimserver, it’s still in beta phase but I’ve not found any problems with it all.

For now I’m going to use this new one in the office room and keep the old Squeezebox 3 in the living room, the old unit has a screen on it, so it acts most of the time (when not playing music!) as very expensive clock, date & weather display. The core functionality of the two models, apart from the screen seems identical - the sound quality remains as good as it ever was.

Again I’m bowled over at the generosity of Logitech for sending these out. Thanks guys!


Posted on April 6, 2006 in Music, iPod by Ben ColemanComments Off

So yet again iTunes starts up and complains - The file “iTunes Library.itl” does not appear to be a valid music library file. iTunes has attempted to recover your music library and renamed this file to
“iTunes Library (Damaged).itl” blah, blah.

Oh, well I thought, it does this ALL the time, and after 15 mins of disk grinding and thrashing the CPU it rebuilds the library. Ooooohhh no, not this time.

It’s all gone, every sodding MP3 from my library. I think spending all day recreating my library of 5000+ MP3 is a good way to spend my time, and evenĀ  after doing all that I’ve still lost all my track ratings and playcounts. thanks Apple for the quality and well tested software that is iTunes.

Why the Apple developers decided it would be a good idea to keep the iTunes library in two places - a binary file (.itl) and a XML file, is beyond me. Just one more thing to go wrong and get out of sync if you ask me (but then I’m not the god like genius that the Apple developers are). BTW, I’m not alone in this problem as a Google search throws up thousands of hits for this problem (no solutions or causes though)

Posted on March 25, 2006 in Java, Music by Ben ColemanNo Comments »

Looking though my statcounter/Google Analytics reports I noticed I was still getting hits for people looking for this software, no idea why anyone is using the MuVo :)
Anyhow I stopped selling, supporting & developing this ages ago but I’ll put it up the full version here for free download if you still want to use it…

I’d put the source code up too, but that appears to have got lost somewhere :(

Disk Download - MuVo Control Center v0.9