News

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

Just a note letting everyone know that the upcoming 2.5.2 release is expected to be the final release of Orange Squeeze, unless there is an absolute show-stopper bug found.

It’s been a fun time developing the app over the past eight years! Orange Squeeze 1.0 was released on December 15, 2011 and development was happening for months before the release. It seems like several lifetimes ago, to be honest.

I appreciate the support of the community, beta testers and new and long-time users. The Squeezebox ecosystem is an amazingly vibrant community and I never expected to be working on this project for as long as I have.

The app will remain for sale on Google Play and Amazon and the liberal refund policies will still be offered. In general, support for the app will cease, except for processing of refunds.

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.