Hi, I thought I would pose a question to the community to generate some discussion about the future of the Squeezebox product we love.
I have personally been using the Squeezebox products and server for about 10 years and it's been a rewarding (sometimes frustrating) ride. I still have my original SB3's and all the squeezeboxs (sans the Transporter) through to the Touch. I am now having great fun experimenting with Raspberry Pi based clients courtesy of Picoreplayer and Squeezeplug. My personal LMS server holds over 6,000 albums across several terabytes of storage. So, my question for 2015 - Is the Universe of LMS and Squeezebox expanding, contracting, or staying about the same? On the expanding side, I am very encouraged by the development of products like Squeezelite that empowers Picoreplayer and Squeezeplug to harness the power of the incredibly malleable Raspberry Pi platform. I think this is an incredible breakthrough and breathes new life into the platform. I am also encouraged at the introduction of services such as Tidal and ability for Squeezebox to access via the ickstream plugin. I am also happy that we can experiment with DSD files using the plugin introduced for LMS. On the contracting side, while USB DAC PC Audio is all the rage it is almost always implemented using some form of host personal computer hooked up to a DAC. I never see anyone utilizing Squeezebox based clients using LMS to accomplish the same thing in a more distributed network environment. Can we as a community do more to publicize the LMS platform? I am also discouraged that pretty much all of the proprietary music server systems seem to use DLNA type technology that we all know doesn't hold a candle to the performance and features of LMS. This, despite many of these systems being no more than customized Linux computers. Is there any reason other manufacturers cannot implement LMS/Squeezebox support into their own products the way open source applications already do? Every time I see a new proprietary music server solution (usually at a high cost) I feel it is always reinventing the wheel and solving problems that have already been solved by LMS? I continue to marvel at the amazing system that Sean Adams and his team created with great foresight that has allowed the Squeezebox ecosystem to continue to live on despite some pretty severe setbacks. I believe that the future remains bright and hope that over time the community will coalesce around solutions that bring great innovation to this platform. -CB ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ctbarker32's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2816 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=102809 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
