If I understand correctly you are trying to compare a PogoPlug type device running shairport or squeezelite. As a user of squeezelite and an airport express I thought that I might try and answer your question. If your music is stored in a centralized location and you do not want to limit yourself to just Cd quality files the Logitech Media Server solution seems to be the best as you have many options for tailoring the listening experience with plugins and options to remotely control a particular player. But on the other hand airplay can stream directly from idevices without the need for a computer so it all depends on how you plan to use it.
You got it exactly! I just started playing with Logitech Media Center and Squeezelite player yesterday.
We don't have Apple products in the house, so ability to play from iDevs isn't as big a deal. I have Android tablets and phones, but these devices don't have any mp3's in them. I can see how iPod users might want to play stuff from their iPods directly.
I did try Airplay using shairport, thinking I can use it to play any source on our laptops and PC. But that doesn't work all that well, at least with the "Airfoil" PC program I used. Audio quality didn't seem very good. Considering how everyone else likes airplay, I probably didn't configure it optimally or the free version of Airfoil doesn't give you good audio? I don't know if airplay protocol was re-encoding the source back to the shairport Pogoplug or what, sometimes I get static when bandwidth shouldn't have been an issue. And I have tablets and phones that would make handy remote controls, but I couldn't really use shairport that way. Also, the device that send the audio has to be kept on. I kind of gave up on Airplay without putting much more effort into figuring it out.
That's when I tried Squeezlite player. Logitech Media Center installed on a Pogoplug, with another Pogoplug running Squeezelite works well. I have some MP3's stored on the LMC Pogoplug. I can set up playlists on the fly, and control the play options either from the PC or tablet. The audio quality was pretty good after I change the setting on LMC to play mp3's at higher quality.
The most useful aspect of the Logitech solution is the internet sources play options. It's almost like Chromecasting, right? From the tablet or PC, I can select some internet audio source (podcast or internet radio), and the Pogoplug running Squeezelite starts streaming it on it's own. The tablet and PC can be shut down. Even the LCM server can be shut down, but then you lose ability to play/pause and stuff. As long as the server Pogoplug is running, I can pick up a different tablet or phone and stop the play and go to the next item on the playlist. That's really really powerful. Can Apple Airplay can do this type of thing? Can Sonos?
I've only come across two problems with the Logitech solution:
I wish the Logitech solution had a better way to send audio files to be played on the Squeezelite player. Sometimes someone in the house has an mp3 file they want to play. The only way I know of now is to throw the file onto the server, then go to the LMC browser interface to direct the Squeezelite box to play that file. Is there a better way, especially from a Windows computer? There's no Squeeze app for Windows other than the full blown server.
And I can't figure out how to play Pandora on the Squeezelite players. I've got the Pandora plugin installed, but it doesn't show up either on the web browser interface or the Android app.
