I live in a place with very bad radio reception. Therefore I recently bought a Logitech Squeezebox Radio, to receive some radio stations through the internet connection without having a PC in the kitchen, just with a small commodity device. Btw. the Squeezebox Radio works flawlessly, good sound, easy to use.

I was only looking for a good internet radio receiver, but then I noticed that with the Squeezebox Radio I got one part of a whole local network streaming environment. You can connect multiple Squeezebox clients to one Squeezebox server, that provides all your music to the clients. The internet radio is actually just a “little” plus to that functionality.

Unfortunately the Squeezebox products don’t support UPNP/AV. So it doesn’t really help that my wonderful WD MyBookLive, that I own as a TimeCapsule replacement, runs Twonky to support that protocol. What I needed is a Squeezebox Server on the MyBoobLive. And yes, there are open source implementations of such a server, running on a variety of embedded devices!

Several steps are required:

  1. Enable SSH access on the MyBookLive. You can do this at the page http://mybooklive/UI/ssh (I didn’t find that linked in the standard UI, but who cares.)
    Note the user/password info.
    Connect to the box: 
    ssh root@mybooklive
  2. Twonky is running on the port that we need for the squeezebox server. Change the port in the line httpport= in the config file to httpport=8000: 
    vi /CacheVolume/twonkymedia/twonkymedia-server.ini  #edit
/etc/init.d/twonky restart                          #restart
  3. Download the server software and install it: 
    wget http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/7.7/sc/33883/logitechmediaserver_7.7.2~33883_all.deb
dpkg -i logitechmediaserver_7.7.2~33883_all.deb
  4. Use your pc browser to connect to http://mybooklive:9000 and configure the music directory to something useful inside of /DataVolume/shares/

That’s it. You may use Sqeezeplay to test everything before purchasing a real Squeezebox.

PS: The download link of step 3 may change. You will find newer editions at http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/index.php The version fitting to the MyBookLive is “Logitech Media Server: Debian Installer Package (i386, x86_64, ARM EABI, PowerPC)”