------------------------------------------------------------------------ A poll associated with this post was created, to vote and see the results, please visit http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96660 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Question: Would you buy a new Squeezebox player if it became available? - Yes , if less than $100 - Yes, if less than $200 - Yes, if less than $500 - Yes, if less than $1000 - Yes - price is no object; I just want the best sound - No - I would NOT buy another Squeezebox player ------------------------------------------------------------------------
moos_man wrote: > It seems to me that one of the brilliant things about the original Slim > product was very nice integration - it was not a bunch of DIY assembly > boards for hackers, but a really neat little box with a very high > wife/girlfriend acceptance factor. That is a fair point, and certainly there would need to be such a turnkey device available. Vortexbox is a good example of how this could end up working. They offer for free download a pre-built server. It's really simple to take pretty much any old PC you have lying around and install Vortexbox. Or if you want to buy a ready-built device, you can buy a Vortexbox Appliance. For a player, I envisage a downloadable Raspberry Pi boot image pre-configured to run Squeezeplay/whatever that someone can just stick on a SD card and plug into a Pi. Control would be via the server web interface and/or iPeng/etc. And for those who just want to buy a working device, an enterprising company could sell pre-built "RaspberrySqueeze Appliances". But let's face facts: there will never be mass market appeal for this. Nobody is going to make their fortune doing it. And regarding the online services (which I admit that I never use): let's be realistic and admit that this side of the ecosystem cannot continue without the support of a major player. Who else will be able to cope with the hassle and cost of negotiating with the likes of Pandora/Spotify/whoever. And who's going to pay to run the central servers? Strikes me that the correct way forward is to develop Squeezebox Server plugins to support online streaming services and return the ecosystem to its original vision, where the user must run a local server. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ cliveb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=348 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96660 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
