1. HOW DO YOU FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY ? About 50% of the time, I know what album I want, and get there via Artist/Album. If it's a "various artists" compilation thing, I go directly to it by Album. Perhaps 40% I use a playlist. Most of my playlists are created with a specific mood and/or genre in mind, so I can pick one that suits me pretty easily. On rare occasion I use the standard Random play by genre. Even more rarely, I use the Search, if I want to find all the different recordings of a particular song or something like that. The other 10% or so of my listening time is not from my own library, but from the Internet; almost all of my "outside" listening is from XM or Pandora.
I have Duets and a Boom, and I also use SoftSqueeze on occasion, usually with wireless headphones when I'm not near any sort of receiver. I use the Controllers to control the Duet Receivers and SoftSqueeze, and sometimes for the Boom, but usually when I'm using the Boom it's near enough that I can use the front panel or the IR remote. It's very rare for me to use a browser to control my Squeezeboxen. If I'm sitting at a computer anyway, I am more likely to use J. River to play music directly on the PC, say in my office. To browse, select and play on the SB devices, the Controller is a much better way for me to go. I don't use any custom add-ons for browsing, and haven't felt a need for them. I know my library pretty well, and can find what I want very quickly using the standard My Music browse features. (My library is just over 1000 albums. I can see where a much larger library might necessitate other search/browse options.) 2. HOW DO YOU USUALLY FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO GET BUT CURRENTLY DON'T HAVE IN YOUR LIBRARY ? I discover new music primarily from three sources: Stuff I hear on Pandora or XM, and recommendations from friends. On rare occasion I might listen to samples from an album recommended by Amazon. I don't listen to broadcast, commercial radio stations, either over the air or on the Net. My wish list of albums I haven't yet got generally numbers around 250, so there's not much danger of running out of ideas for new music for awhile. I've pretty much always heard at least a track or two before I buy an album. This doesn't always guarantee I'll like the entire album once I get it, but I can usually be sure I'll like at least some of it. 3. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE ABLE TO FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY IN THE FUTURE ? I'm very satisfied with the standard browse/search/select funtionality in the existing Controller and Boom interfaces, so I haven't really felt like I'm missing anything. If I happened to read a suggestion for a new method that I thought I might find useful, I'd express an interest, but since I have never even felt the need to install any custom search/browse add-on, I must be pretty happy with the way it works out of the box. 4. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO BUY/GET IN THE FUTURE ? Having such a large backlog of music I still don't have, I'm not hurting for new sources of music. 5. WHAT KIND OF TAGGING/MANAGEMENT DO YOU DO ON NEW MUSIC YOU ADD TO YOUR LIBRARY TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND STUFF LATER ON ? When I rip a CD, I always check the tags dbPoweramp grabbed. About 98% of the time, I have to fix spelling, punctuation, genre or something. I'm very meticulous and fussy about my tags. I've never found a need to use any non-standard tags or anything that SBS doesn't currently handle. I suppose the only area that I think could use improvement is in the classical stuff, but I can't imagine that ever getting a wide enough user base to make it much of a priority. Folder structure is important only to me, obviously not to SBS (well, apart from the all-under-one-master-folder restriction, which has never been a problem for me). I organize the folders in a fairly standard way (MainFolder/FileType/Artist/Album), to make it easier for me to find a particular album or song from outside of SBS. I do keep my FLAC (vast majority of my library) separate from MP3 stuff, and I also keep a parallel library of all the FLACs converted to MP3 for use in portables and so forth. I don't do ratings; I know what I like, and if I don't like it, it probably isn't in my library anyway. 6. DO YOU SYNCHRONIZE THE DATA IN SBS WITH SOME OTHER APPLICATION TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND INTERESTING MUSIC ? Don't use statistics or ratings. I do use J. River as a player on PCs, and it uses the same library that SBS does. It keeps in sync via its normal scans. I also use it pretty much exclusively to create and maintain playlists, which I then export as M3Us, run through a text editor macro to convert the path structure, and save into the SBS playlist directory. Then I just do a rescan of the playlists in SBS. -- Dogberry2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dogberry2's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18883 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
