A few years ago, I bought myself a Squeezebox Receiver, seen in the image below on the left. These are usually sold with a remote, and called a Squeezebox Duet. I was able to buy the Receiver without the Remote as it was around half the price of the Duet package, but there was an issue. I’ll get to that in a minute.
I’d bought the Receiver, as I had previously got a Squeezebox Boom (pictured below), and was really impressed with the system. The “Squeezebox” systems consist of a server (once called Squeezebox Server, now called Logitech Media Server) running on either a PC, or a NAS device, such as a QNAP, and a music player, such as the Squeezebox Boom, or Receiver. The Boom is a stand-alone player, with built in speakers, and mighty good ones at that for such a small package, whereas the Receiver needs to be plugged into an existing stereo system. This was exactly what I wanted as I already had a very good surround sound system for my entertainment system.
Now the problem… normally when you are configuring the Squeezebox Receiver, you use the Remote to detect a Receiver in Initialisation mode, and you can then go about setting things like whether to use Wifi, the Wifi Security, the IP address of the Squeezebox Server, etc. So this was a problem, as I didn’t buy the remote. Thanks to a quick google search, I was able to find this handy guide that someone created to enable you to run a Perl script to configure the Receiver.
I had a lot of issues getting the scripts to run on my Windows 8 64bit machine. The perl script itself would run fine, but the “discover” command simply would not find my Receiver. Thankfully, I have a laptop with Linux Mint currently installed (previously Ubuntu), and the scripts run flawlessly on Linux. If I get some more free time over the next few days, I will have a play with the scripts on my Windows machine to see if I can get it working. If I do, I will post an update here.
Edit (14/06/2014): I have since tried this again on a Windows 8.1 64bit machine, and it worked flawlessly. All I had to do was download the 64bit version of Active Perl, and the set-up steps worked without any issues. I guess there was an issue with my environment set-up previously, as this was on a fairly new install of Win 8.1.
Hi,
did you get around to fixing the scripts for Windows 8? I have to dig out my old Windows Vista laptop to connect to my Squeezebox unit and it would be nice to use the ordinary computer (Windows 7) or the Macbook Air laptop.
/Lars
Hi Lars,
No I didn’t do anything further with the scripts on Windows 8. Once I got it working with my Linux laptop, there was no need to use my Win8 machine to do anything. I do need to check my Squeezebox Receiver settings though, as my home network settings have changed, and it is not currently working. I’ll take a look at it again on my Win8 machine and let you know if I have any luck.
Hi again Lars,
I managed to try again on my Windows 8 machine, and it worked flawlessly. There must have been an issue with my configuration previously, as I am on a relatively new install of Windows 8.1 64bit, and all I did was download and install the 64bit version of Active Perl, and I could connect to the Squeezebox Receiver to do the configuration.
Hope this helps.