Thought I would chime in here. Yes I agree also with everything everyone is saying which is why I still am with LMS at home. Phillip and Michael and many others have been amazing and we all owe them more gratitude than we can give them. I even tried Roonlabs for their 30 day trial and even through their Metadata display engine is unbelievable amazing, I chose not to move to them. (here is why https://community.roonlabs.com/t/thanks-roon-but-i-am-passing-for-the-following-reasons/31511/4). I also decided to use Bluesound in my office, mainly because their powernode 2 comes in a very very small single package and sounds leap years head of sonos and i just needed it for one zone.
However, you cannot discount challenges that LMS has (so a little tough love): 1. with the system being opensource, support for problems is mostly trial and error by the end user with support by the community here -- and that is usually by Philip or Michael. this can be unbelievable frustrating. I just had to install SSL on my QNAP NAS to get the podcasts working right. I am not exaggerating when I say that it took me 60 hours of my time, at least 10 different people over two different forums (here and the QNAP forum), probably 30 to 40 different posts on about 10 different threads, etc.. etc.. and worst of all, I had almost zero idea what I was doing. Most people won't do this, most when they try may break something else while fixing, etc.. etc.. even with my issue I saw over the forums that people broke things not related to their issue and just gave up. 2. to the above point, as 20 year old LMS equipment breaks down and as things need fixing (ie the above issue), you're going to get into Linux and the vast majority of people won't do this. and the ones here that aren't there yet, then they have to make that decision, they'll bail and go to something else. (Bluesound is the way to go over Sonos). And quite frankly, they shouldn't have to get into Linux. 3. there are just a ton of quarks to LMS, especially in the end user navigation, setup, plugins, etc.. the installation of plugins, the descriptions of them, the setup of plugins, then on top of all that, functionality appears to be somewhat hap-hazard and inconsistent and the server code itself needs a bit of love. in addition, there is no plausible avenue for someone who knows nothing about streaming and wants to get into it, to use LMS. unless that person is willing to spend 100's of hours researching and figuring out where to buy stuff, then set it all up via Linux, etc... someone who has a lot of experience with LMS will have to set it up for someone else. Another example of this is I use Deezer HiFi. (Tidal's music collection is not nearly as wide and deep as Deezer and although I can hear a bit of difference in some music between CD and 92/24, it's not enough to justify Tidal). However, to get all of Deezer working, I have to use it via ickstream and use it via mysqueezebox.com. Both ways are completely different in it's navigation and quite honestly, it's frustrating. Each source of music seems to work and navigate almost completely differently. It's stupidly frustrating. My wife, she can't use it. She has to ask me to play something specific because it's so confusing and she is always asking me to put things on favorites because the navigation is so different between each source of music. But I put up with it because I love opensource, I love LMS and I am willing to put in the stupid amount of time to insure it keeps working. The vast majority of people won't put up with it and like I said about, quite frankly, they shouldn't have to. Companies like Roonlabs and Bluesound are making incredible strides. Eventually, their end user apps and server functionality will exceed that of LMS. I hope that doesn't happen and I would love to see LMS stay at the forefront of the market. For that to happen, I think very soon we as a community will have to decide that we need resources to clean up LMS, add functionality to keep it ahead of everyone else, and just make it easier and more consistent. I am wiling to do it. I am even will to pay money and learn Linux (which I sort of had to do to get the SSL thing working). Anyway.. I love LMS and I hope we all continue to stay engaged. LMS 7.9.1 on QNAP 219P+ 3 wired Touch End Points Jolida Tube DAC III Marantz 2270 to Boston Acoustics Slimlines Marantz 7010 to B&W CM10 S2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ dhallag's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=30845 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=107925 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
