Mildly entertaining.

In case you’re not interested in the Squeezebox review and just want to know what calming music works for us with our baby I’ll outline it first and save you some time. That said, I can’t say enough how great its been having boundless music options throughout our house immediately at our fingertips without having to keep our computers running.

Our calming sound preferences and one very specific CD:
Calming Wave Sounds
Sounds of Chirping Crickets
Steady Rainstorm Sounds
Peaceful Babbling Brook Sounds
Deep Forest Comparsa – A personal favorite

Now, on to my review of our use of the Squeezebox Duet to maintain sanity as new parents
Consider this product review number two, though I didn’t actually buy this in response to having our son. We’ve had our Logitech Squeezebox Duet for almost two years now and we’ve loved it with a few exceptions (poor firmware upgrades) but man, I really appreciate it now. Why? The selection it brings, and the fact that most of it is available at any time.

Radio’s good, but you’re restricted to the few channels it picks up and what is playing at the time you want to listen. Internet radio’s great, but having to fire up the laptop to manage music is also a pain. The squeezebox is great because a) it is aware of all the digital music we have b) it has access to thousands of Internet radio stations across the world and across all conceivable genres and c) there are whole sets of channels dedicated to calming noises perfect for bedtime.

I’m not sure what products they’ve introduced in the past couple years, so I can’t comment on what the best buy is out there but we remain happy with our duet. We purchased a second receiver for another room in the house as well. One recommendation that I do have if you can find a location selling lone receivers (Amazon offers them here) is not to buy the full receiver and remote combination if you’re an iphone or android smartphone user. Both of these devices offer pretty solid Squeezebox remote apps for a fraction of the price of the full remote hardware. If you don’t have one of these phones then by all means get the remote.

Anyway, as I said… if the day calls for NPR we can listen to NPR. If it calls for a certain podcast we can access that podcast at our leisure… and if the evening is fully of baby cries we can pull up the white noise channels and choose from crickets, bubbling brooks, thunder and many other calming, repeating tracks to soothe junior to sleep. Sure they cost a couple bucks, but man… my sleep is worth it.

There’s a pretty good review of the Squeezebox Duet here.

Of greater concern in my opinion are the bears playing the music.

As of a few moments ago, not I.

Cute? Yes.
Troubling despite being cute? Absolutely.

I would definitely make a point of exposing him to other artists.

I stumbled across this on RedFlagDeals this morning, originally posted because of the free lullaby offered on the site. What I found more interesting is the Soothing Sound Mixer (click Tools for a better sleep, top right) that lets you create your own background noise from a set of available sounds like rain falling, heartbeats, traffic among many other options. You can even mix various sounds together, control the volume, schedule a time for it to turn off, save and share your creations.

For those curious about the lullabies, they are Lullaby and Goodnight, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Hush Little Baby, Rock-A-Bye Baby and All The Pretty Horses and can be found here.