Hi, Responding to sprev's comments . . .
>Also, the difficulty of building a computer music library is overestimated. etc This is something where I really disagree. Among my friends I am a geek. In general my friends do not own MP3 players, they do not rip music, they know what an iPod is but wouldn't use one. They do however have a hifi and a CD player. These people are in their 30's. When you look at their parents they're not even likely to own a PC. While there are a lot of people out there that do understand this stuff (enough to be a mssive market) I'm not sure the mainstream really understands this technology yet. They are still a long way off absorbing what it means to have all your music in one place. The 'killer app' experience among my friends is the Random Mix feature of slimserver. So far it is only really this feature that distinguishes the SB/Computer from a simple CD player. Some of my friends that have reasonable collections are also impressed by last.fm and audioscrobbler as a means of finding new music. Otherwise (for the most part) they just don't see the value. As with all of these things the above is just my experience based on the circumstances/community I find myself in. Also I'd like to point out that my significant other has had some diffculty getting used to it. She finds the interface confusing and clunky (too many features). Previously she had 20 CDs which she could easily find and play, unfortunately introducing the SB made it harder, there are loads of features to navigate through, her 20 CDs are lost among my 450 or so. Bear in mind she doesn't even always remember the artist name with her cds, mostly she'd just recall what the CD cover looked like. I believe her experience is pretty common (or would be if the general population were exposed to the SB) - I believe it _is_ the mainstream, we're the early adopters on the fringes. Finally, I think I come across as a bit emphatic in the above, sorry, I'm not trying to be argumentative I just couldn't think of a better way of expressing it. Malcolm _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
