I guess I live in the house of "Discontinued products" Pronto PRO's and Squeezebox. Fortunately nothing stops working. Squezebox works fine and with the right plugins you can have it setup the audio system it is connected to using IR.

For example in my Master Bedroom, the squeezebox player is connected to a Mitsubishi 150 watt stereo power amp that had no IR. I built a little device that takes an IR signal and controls a 110v recepticle. Cost me about $60. When the squeezebox player turns on it sends an IR signal to the power control and the Amp powers up. When the player turns off it shuts off the amp.

In the Theater the Transporter sends an XAP message to the PC that controls the Theater to turn on the audio system (Anthem) and set the source correctly and the volume to default. Anything done to the Transporter results in an XAP message to the PC using UDP so the volume of the A/V system tracks the "Setting" of the Transporter. The Transporter is set for fixed volume as it plays a lot of encoded tracks (DTS). I use an iPad running Squeezepad for control, or the Pronto app I wrote for the squeeze system years ago. Either one works fine because of the PC (think poor mans Crestron) in the loop. Even manual control from the front of the Transporter works correctly.

I can't emphasize how much additional flexibility you get by having a PC "in the loop". Squeezepad will even wake up a PC out of sleep (State S3) when it loads, so the PC will draw very little power yet can issue all sorts of control sequences using IP, IR or Serial. Since SqueezeServer using the XAP plugin can send all sorts of messages to a PC apprise it of the state of every player in real time, it is easy to control all sorts of auxiliary equipment (Amps, AVP's, AVR's, etc. The possibilities are endless.