Hi Erland! First a brief description of my usage of music. My digital library consists of 3020 albums of 38,200 tracks. I don't collect or download individual tracks. I have 2 libraries of these, one FLAC files for SBS, the other M4a for my smartphone, managed by Itunes.
I have added everyone of those albums from CD's ripped on my desktop PC using dbpoweramp. All my album artwork is 1000 x 1000 jpg files (where available), looks great ported to the TV! I also extensively tag my albums using the Genre & Style tags. I don't download free music or purchase music online. I am also slowly digitizing an LP collection of 3,800 discs, though I don't expect to complete this in my lifetime. :-) I have a Touch and a Duet and these have revolutionized my listening life over the past 6 years or so. I am a heavy user of the SBS ecosystem, I work from home and would be streaming AND listening to squeezebox delivered, glorious sound, 6 - 14 hours of most days. This has resulted in a huge increase in listening pleasure due to ease of access to my music. For this reason alone I love my Squeezebox!! Now to the questions. 1/ I use the 1st 4 options only. I am a heavy user of the SBS ecosystem. - Desktop PC 50% of the time - Smartphone 20% of the time - Tablet 20% of the time - Duet Controller 10% of the time I foresee my tablet and smartphone usage increasing to probably 30 - 40% and the PC decreasing to 30 - 40% in the next year or so. 2/ I play only entire albums (in the order as recorded/released by the artists) 99% of the time. I am therefore very interested in more options regarding queueing, stacking, ordering of albums, NOT individual tracks. I would like to see something like Spicefly, etc. which queues albums by some form of mood, tempo, style fingerprinting, as opposed to tracks which are already well catered for. I know from talking to friends using SBS, Sonos and other platforms that a lot of people are album as opposed to track listeners and there is a lot of scope to improve the album listening experience. I use random play of albums 60% of the time because it's really the only easy option available and manualy select albums as the mood dictates the other 40% of the time. 3/ See 2/ 4/ Lack of album playing/queueing options as discussed in 2/. 5/ I use the first 4 options only, probably in percentages pretty close to the device percentages in 1/ and foresee doing so in the near future. 6/ I remove or add & re-order abums in playlists. The biggest problem with SBS and the one that needs fixing FIRST is the prehistoric look and functionality of the front end. The inability to seamlessly scroll through entire libraries instead of laborious A-Z, page by page selections is ludicrous!! It also looks atrocious when ported to a LCD TV, which I like to do. This should have been updated years ago. I know Ipeng gets around this for smartphones/tablets, but there's still a lot of us out there using desktop/laptop PC's as well as smartphones/tablets and will be for a while. I know several people who have looked at my PC SBS front end and just laughed at it. A pity because everything else, the flexibilty and plethora of 3rd party app's, such as yours, still makes it the best digital music option by a wide margin ( I think). At least there is the excellent Muso browser to help with this (Moose is also very good, though a bit dated looking). Well that's my 2 penny's worth. Keep up the good work Erland, I really appreciate the use I get out of your apps........ I use them everyday in some form or other. The Icky Stick thingy sounds really interesting as well, looking forward to developments with interest!! Cheers..............Bruce. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ kiwibrucie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=31674 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=94988 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
