Author: Ben Sandee

Open Squeeze, an Open Source repository containing most of the Orange Squeeze app, has been made public. Enjoy!

By popular request, I have released French and German translations of Orange Squeeze as part of the first beta of version 2.3.6. Update to the beta to try them out.

The translations are done with the help of Google Translate, six years of French in school (25 years ago), six weeks of German with Rosetta Stone (ten years ago), the Logitech Media Server source code (which has a lot of useful translations in the Squeezebox domain), along with a bit of common sense. I’m 100% sure that they are terrible, borderline embarrassing, but I hope that they are better than seeing English day-in and day-out if that is not your native language.

Please send comments to info@orangebikelabs.com or use the help button to open a ticket with any suggestions on better translations or to have a conversation about what the heck a sentence or word is supposed to mean.

Again, my apologies for the terrible translations.

Recently we’ve been getting a lot of emails about Spotify support in Orange Squeeze, likely due to changes on the Spotify servers. These problems can result in very long response times from Spotify requests, where other local music plays just fine. In this post I’ll try to set some expectations for these service integrations.

In short, Orange Squeeze has no direct support for Spotify or any other streaming service (Tidal, Pandora, etc.). Instead, Orange Squeeze is a generic browser of your Squeezebox server, and it is up to the Squeezebox server to provide access to services like Spotify. It is on your server that plugins like the official Spotify plugin or the semi-official Spotty plugin are installed to provide a bridge between the Squeezebox ecosystem and a service like Spotify.

When your Spotify subscription seems to be acting up, the first place that you will see it misbehaving may be on your phone with Orange Squeeze, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think Orange Squeeze is at fault. Unfortunately, it is usually not where problems like this are solved. Nearly always, what you need to do to resolve these issues is update your Spotify plugin on the server or check your server plugin’s configuration.

You may be completely unaware of the many layers of software that collaborate to provide your music services, particularly if you have a turnkey system like a Vortexbox or Innuos Zen. Even with these turnkey systems, the underlying software is mostly the same, it’s just a convenient bundling and packaging of it. Sometimes the systems are updated as a whole, or sometimes you can update single components like plugins. Because there are such a wide variety of configurations of software and hardware, it is not feasible to provide support for these.

I’ve started compiling a frequently asked question list for Orange Squeeze. More will be added, but enjoy a bit of info about the Google Assistant integration to start with.

Today we relaunch the Orange Squeeze beta program with a seemingly small, but important update.

2.2.0-beta1 simply adds notification controls, but there are many underlying changes to support this so it has been made a beta release. Check this link for more information about the beta program.

In related news, 2.1.11 is now/still the stable version of Orange Squeeze.

As always, check this link for complete release notes for beta and non-beta releases.

Today we launched Orange Squeeze 2.1.5 across both app stores (Google Play and Amazon). As always, this is a free upgrade.

If you haven’t upgraded in awhile, you’ll see some a visual refresh and plenty of little bug fixes. More importantly for some, it also fixes compatibility with mysqueezebox.com on modern Android devices. You can read about all of the changes in the complete changelog.

We’ve been slowly staging builds for the past few weeks but that effort is mostly completed and now work will shift to the long-idle ‘preview’ branch, which will be available as an opt-in beta at some time in the future. We appreciated the feedback as we worked through a backlog to get the production version of the app stable on modern devices.

This release is available for Android 4.1 and higher, however the stores will still distribute older releases to older devices, as appropriate.

Over the past two weeks we’ve been staging rollouts of versions of Orange Squeeze 2.1.3, with version 2.1.3-5 released today to Google Play. This is an effort to bring the app back into compliance with modern Android versions including the upcoming Android O (Orange?). The release is stabilizing so it should be available to everyone soon on Google Play and Amazon.

Check this link for a detailed list of changes.

Work continues separately on the beta version of Orange Squeeze that was previously shelved. More information to come on this once we get 2.1.3 wrapped up.

For a three-week period Orange Squeeze was removed from Google Play and Amazon appstores, but it is back up now. Thank you for your patience.

Today we released a new version of Orange Squeeze that is compatible with Android 6.0 (Marshmallow). It’s a small release but actually includes a lot of under-the-hood changes to work with the new Android release. We will be monitoring support channels to ensure that any new bugs are fixed quickly.