I apologize for this rant in advance, but I am really frustrated. I've had a Squeezebox 3 since early 2006, and had wanted one for a long time previous to that. Conceptually, I think it is about the best idea ever, but in practice, I am thoroughly unhappy with it -- indeed, my wife refers to it as the bane of my existence. I am wondering if perhaps anyone can suggest ways to make me happier with it.
At the root of the problem is SqueezeCenter. I have it running on a reasonably fast (2.8GHz, 3GB) XP computer connected via ethernet cables. But, no matter what I do, it is too slow. The process of finding music is slow (I have about 11,000 tracks to dig through, and adding a song generally requires numerous clicks, and lots of waiting), the process of adding/removing things from a playlist is cumbersome and slow, it doesn't seem to keep any statistics on what is played or when, the process of scanning my library was horrible -- most albums have wrong album art, the same album will show up multiple times, each with only some of the tracks in it (this is after ripping with EAC), if I have 2 versions of a track (MP3 and FLAC) no distinction is made until one drills down meaning that it takes as long to find a track as the previous one took to play, and playback drops out or freezes periodically. Moreover, it is buggy software -- I listened to an album the other day. Then, last night I listened to something else. Today, the playlist from days ago was back in the queue. When I move tracks around in the list, they don't always move to were they were put. Often what is playing and what squeezecenter says is playing are different, etc. The Squeezebox has been back and needed a new CPU at one point, so the device itself seems to work fine. And, the computer has been rebuilt and been clean installed. Moreover, I tried other computers with no better results. Basically, what I am saying is that the Squeezebox, for me, should do three things. It should play music, it should make organizing music simple, and it should present a clean interface. It utterly fails at the second two, and periodically fails at the first. Conversely, programs like Winamp, Foobar, iTunes, and even WMP present user interfaces that are remarkably better. Yes, I understand that Squeezecenter presents a web interface so it can be used from remote systems, but does that need to preclude a reasonable non-web interface from running locally, or via remote desktop? And yes, I understand that it is opensource, so I can implement these things myself, but that it not an excuse. Logitech is a big company and can supply reasonable software for their hardware. I am a programmer, and I designed and build my whole stereo (DAC, preamp, power amp, and speakers), and I don't have that kind of time. So, what I think this thing needs is either its own non-web based interface (I've tried Moose -- neat software, but too slow both because .Net is miserable and because it is still just interfacing with the same horrible backend), or a plugin for Winamp, Foobar, or whatever to make it behave like a remote soundcard. I have seen a few scattered posts of others asking for this, but to date nothing that works has jumped out at me. As I say, I really wanted this to work, and I am really sad that it is just not the device for me. Conceptually, everything about is fantastic, but every time I try to use it it makes me angry. -- drs ------------------------------------------------------------------------ drs's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3536 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=60755 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
