After years of development, LMS, a central part of Squeezebox based solution, has become a big monolithic Web application. To be fair, it works nicely (thanks to community); however, it has an essential drawback (one may consider it as a design flaw) – everything has to be managed by LMS. Music collection (local / remote), streaming services, alarms, etc. have to be integrated within LMS through plugins or similar.
This is where SlimStreamer comes in: it decouples Squeezebox streaming capability from the rest of the functionality around managing music (
Single responsibility principle). Any application that outputs audio to a default ALSA device can be used as a music source for streaming. In fact, audio streaming is done transparently by SlimStreamer and SlimPlexor (an ALSA plugin) behind the scene. Moreover, SlimStreamer captures PCM stream in a bit-perfect way (without resampling to a predefined sample rate), which allows streaming audio in best possible quality!