mrkerr;503876 Wrote: > I've had the roku setup on my system for the past three years or so and > haven't had any major problems with it. Unfortunately, its an abandoned > piece of hardware so I've been looking at replacing it with a squeezebox > of late; when the Radio was announced I figured it would be good gifts > for my teenage daughters and a chance for me to test the squeezebox > waters. What follows is my overall impressions. > > I like the looks of the radio; I bought the red version. I like the > screen (nice to have the graphics over roku's rather limited text > screen) and the sound is fine for what it is. > > I like the Pandora and internet radio features (Pandora is what the > girls use most on the radio) and it works great and reliably so far. > The roku could handle internet radio as well but again, the interface on > the radio makes things a bit simpler. > > The menu tree on the radio took some getting use to but the girls and I > have gotten better at it with time. I had some difficulties in the > beginning finding some of the stuff buried in the menus; a menu tree in > the user guide or on-line would have been helpful. > > Initial start-up documentation was adequate. Setting up the radio, > accessing the wireless network, and doing Pandora and internet radio was > very easy and worked great. > > And then i installed Squeezebox Server... > > The next step was to get the radios to access the girls music > libraries. In the roku, its pretty simple. iTunes has to be running on > the computer with the music you want, and the roku then "sees" the > library and can access the music. if you want to switch to another > computer's music and its running iTunes, then its just a click to change > to that library. Very simple. > > SBS seems to be over complicated. Granted, the plug-ins and stuff give > it some nice options but overall, it just seems for the most part, > unnecessary. Using iTunes was much easier; not having to worry about > what directories store what or having the SBS rescan libraries. I have > the music on a network drive and my PS3 can access the music directly > without any extra software as can the roku; not sure why we have to have > the SBS running all the time. > > Granted, it wouldn't be a big deal to run SBS if it was just a better > piece of software. In just the week I've been running it I've had > problems with it just quitting on its own, disconnecting from the radios > at random times, music scans dieing mid-way. I've spent several hours > on the forums searching for similar problems and finding that I'm not > alone...seems to be several out there that have had similar issues. > I've tried many of the fixes with mixed results; I've fixed the scan > problem by killing my anti-virus (the excluding file types didn't work) > and turning my firewall off completely (none of the recommended firewall > settings seem to fix anything). > > It also runs slow and just getting to the control panel or web > interface takes forever. Frankly, the whole thing seems like a beta > version...I could be a bit more forgiving if the squeezboxes were brand > new products but the server should be more mature than this by now. > > It's also klunky...many of the settings and options aren't readily > apparent what they require or even do (it took a while for me to figure > out what "use iTunes" did and I still can't get any applets to show up > on the radios) and again, the scanning thing seems to be unnecessary. > Why can't it just "look" at the music directly without scanning like all > of the other media servers do? I'm also having pretty much hit or miss > luck with getting album artwork to show up. > > It would also help if there was better documentation available for SBS; > the manual barely addresses it and the wiki isn't very helpful either. > So far the forums are the only avenue to really try and get your hands > around the thing which is a shame. > > So, overall, I'd give the internet radio and Pandora and Facebook > aspects of the radio and the hardware itself an "A"...but the my music > feature gets pulled down to a "C-" with the klunky and unreliable SBS. > The girls are happy with the non-my music features and simply use their > ipods to plug into the radio when "my music" is misbehaving...I'll hold > off on buying a Duet until SBS gets better..and just use the PS3 and > roku to stream music in the mean time.
Hi There I agree that SBS doesn't look that great and the functionality needs improvement, however I've never personally had any performance issues with it, both from a Dell laptop and a low powered atom based server - what kit are you running the SBS on ? Are your performance problems related to accessing the web interface or in the server application streaming music and being slow to stream ? Ian ps I have the radio as well in the Kitchen and am a big fan -- socistep ------------------------------------------------------------------------ socistep's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18860 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=73677 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
