I have just discovered a new iPhone application that has put a smile on my face: iPeng.
It turns an iPhone into a beautiful handheld controller for playing music via a Squeezebox.
Browse penguinlovesmusic for photos of the app.
We have a Logitech Squeezebox Duet in the living room, with an optical connection from the receiver to a Sony DAV-DZ260 home theatre system — no hi-fi, no CDs, no records, no cassettes.
In my study I have an old Slim Devices Squeezebox 2 player, an old amplifier and two old speakers on top of the bookshelves.
Both stream music from a ReadyNAS storage box in a cupboard in the hall (photo here).
Somehow the Duet’s handset made that of the old Squeezbox seem primitive and my use of it declined, rather as I could never go back to texting by pushing buttons three times to generate letters on a phone.
What would be really nice, I thought, would be an iPhone application.
Eventually, today, I got around to looking for one. I found iPeng and Squeemote and chose the former, though the penguin references on the penguinlovesmusic site seem, maybe appropriately, a little flat-footed.
In the course of playing with it I streamed Birdsong radio to both players and the house was full of the sounds of thrushes blackbirds, pigeons and more. Pausing and resuming the dawn chorus with the slightest tap of a finger was oddly magical. Waking up to it — it’s easily programmable via the alarm function — would somehow be wrong; I prefer the real thing.
I’d read about Birdsong some months ago when it supposedly died (BBC story) but had never listened to it before. It’s definitely something I’ll listen to again.
iPeng is wonderful.
It isn’t just cheaper than a Logitech handset by a huge margin, it’s much nicer. And it works on an iPod Touch too.
The touch screen is just so much better than any other control, it’s a delight. Voice-activated selection may follow some day, but it will always be enjoyable to flick through cover art.
The new Squeezebox Touch is cute, but if you already have an Apple device with a touch screen the Duet’s receiver and iPeng are a much better investment (and at £86 in total, about one third the cost).
You can have fun without buying anything. This blog post describes how to use an iPhone (or iPod Touch) to control the freely downloadable Logitech SqueezeCenter music server (available here).
The web site for iPeng needs a revamp (a blog is not documentation). It hasn’t been kept fully in sync with the application and, rather oddly, shows the times of posts but not the dates. Nevertheless, this is still a terrific application.
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