15 Oct 09 VortexBox announces Australian reseller

Vortexbox is proud to announce our first VortexBox appliance reseller. We now have a reseller in Australia http://www.vortexbox.com.au. The case we use for the VortexBox appliance was not available in Australia so the Australian version uses a slightlly different case. If you want the original VortexBox appliance we can ship it to Australia for $40. If you want to save the customs hassles and buy direct from an Australian company buy an appliance from http://www.vortexbox.com.au.

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04 Oct 09 SqueezeBox Server on VortexBox

We have an upgrade ready for SqueezeBox Server 7.4. This will replace SqueezeCenter that VortexBox is currently using. To preform the upgrade type the following on the VortexBox command line.

cp /etc/squeezecenter/custom-convert.conf /tmp cp /etc/squeezecenter/server.conf /tmp

yum update

cp /tmp/*.conf /etc/squeezeboxserver/

reboot

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24 Sep 09 VortexBox NAS with Twonky Media server

Some VortexBox users have requested easy installation of Twonky Media server. For those of you who don’t know Twonky Media server is a $30 UPnP server. This allows you to stream music and video to any UPnP compliant device. Although VortexBox already has a free UPnP server installed the free server doesn’t work that well with some devices.

So if you want to stream your media to your xbox 360 or other UPnP device this in the add-on for you. To install Twonky Media server type this from command line.

yum clean all

yum update

yum install twonkymedia

One Twonky Media server is installed you will need to buy a $30 license from http://www.twonkymedia.com/ you can enter the license code through the web GUI.

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04 Sep 09 VortexBox 0.9 released

We have added a lot of great features to this release. These include

FLAC to mp3 mirroring through the web GUI.
Backup to USB drive through the web GUI
Built in Simplify Media server with web GUI configuration
Better auto cover art. Using both Amazon and Google images

We have also added a few other small enhancements like the ability to restart SC through the web GUI. The ripping process is now a little different. CDs are only auto ripped to FLAC files. This speeds up the ripping process to 4-6 minutes for an average CD even on a slow machine. Then you can use the FLAC mirroring to generate mp3 files. You can start this process and it will run until all your FLAC files are converted even in you close your browser window. The mirroring process will also mirror cover art and any .txt files you have with your FLAC files.

The USB backup system works by formatting your drive to NTFS (you have to start the format process) Because VortexBox formats the drive we don’t have to worry about and strange format issues and because the backup process uses NTFS you can mount your backup drive on a windows machine if you want.
As always you can install a new system using the ISO or type

yum update

to update an existing system.

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03 Sep 09 SqueezeBox Radio and Squeezebox Touch released

In case you haven’t noticed the much anticipated SqueezeBox Radio was released today. This is a really cool device that’s like half a SqueezeBox Boom with a color screen. It’s also $100 less then the boom for basically the same functionality plus a color screen with cover art.

Logitech also released the Logitech Squeezebox Touch. The Touch is a color touchscreen version of the Squeezebox classic. It has a touch screen but a regular screen less remote. Amazon.com seems to have the cheapest price so far.

If you click on the links at left you will pay the same price and a donation will go to the VortexBox project.

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28 Aug 09 VortexBox BETA program

I have started a BETA program so the community can help test new versions of VortexBox before they are released. You can learn more about this program in the new BETA forum.

http://vortexbox.org/forum/beta/welcome-to-the-vortexbox-beta-program/

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07 Aug 09 VortexBox Singapore ISO mirror

We now have a mirror download server in Singapore. This is good news for the AsiaPac region. They were seeing slow downloads from our US based download server.

http://www.wizardwebs.net/vortexbox/vortexbox-0.8.iso

Many thanks to VortexBox community member wizardofoz for providing this mirror to the VortexBox community!

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30 Jul 09 VortexBox XEN image

The people at http://xenforge.org/ have started hosting a XEN image of VortexBox. This way you can test VortexBox in a XEN environment before you commit a machine to it. You could also run VortexBox in conjunction with some other OS.

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