This has been an interesting thread so far. I'm going to jump in with a couple comments.
FWIW, I agree with the camp that sees audio and video as two entirely different animals. Children happily ask to watch the same Disney film over and over again, and teenagers might watch the same slasher film 18 times over, but even first rate video is largely once through watching except maybe for film students. OTOH, good audio gets played over and over again by what I suspect is the majority of people. Logitech shouldn't try to be all things to all people with SB. Video might be a nice to have, but the core functionality should focus on audio. The big game changer, of course, has been the transition from music being distributed in hard media (records, tapes, CD) to digital media. What this has done is forced the issue of music metadata to the foreground, and I think that points to a killer feature. I think it's reasonable to say that it used to be a relatively small part of the population that accumulated such a large collection of audio that organizing it for accessibility became a big challenge, and those people tended to be of a certain age just because it took time and money to accumulate the collection. In the last couple years I've had the, er, interesting experience of observing how teenagers and young 20s adults consume music. In a lot of respects the behaviours and motivations are the same as when I was that age, but without the limitations of physical media to slow down accumulation. My wife's eldest son has almost 10,000 cuts on his computer. It took me the better part of 20 years to accumulate a similar collection (paying for it :-/). The problem is knowing what you have and being able to access it. A superlative system would provide excellent metadata combined with an excellent UI that allows navigation of the collection by metadata. Squeezebox Server does the latter fairly well, and certainly much better than certain popular devices with names beginning with "i". It's probably true, as some others have commented, that the dream of providing robust metadata to go with the UI is too ambitious to take on, but perhaps a clever combination of good standards and social networking might achieve it over time. Another very positive attribute of SB is that the devices and software understand the content as data through and through. In the long term, with increasingly ubiquitous network connectivity, the notion of carrying around a collection of music on a physical device will look as anachronistic as carting around a bunch of disks in cardboard sleeves. (For that matter, degrading the quality of your content to transmit it over a network or fit it onto a device will look like a poor compromise to deal with insufficient hardware.) Local caches of content aren't likely to go away, but the boundary between them and caches or streams coming from the cloud will become increasingly fuzzy. I think Logitech needs to keep its eye on this ball. Finally, I agree with those who suggest that strong support for third party developers is very important. This allows people to provide functionality that customizes the platform to serve the needs of subsets of users, which recognizes that one size will never fit all well in the realm of music. -- stephenkca ------------------------------------------------------------------------ stephenkca's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7820 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=72512 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
