DrNic;207500 Wrote: > I guess that since Logitech have bought the company this sort of make it > all simple for joe (below?) average is going to be the voice of the > masses on these forums soon. Shame. > I am all for creating the "Basic" and "Advanced" setup pages, then > those people who can barely open a word document without needing help > will be happy that their Squeezebox/Slimserver combo works with little > fuss.I don't think the advanced setup option will be the major problem for this kind of people. Those that barely can open a word document will have a lot bigger problem to actually rip and tag their music correctly.
For the average Joe I think this is the most important step to improve. As an example look at iTunes, you just insert the CD and you will get a question and it will automatically rip the CD, download correct tag information from Internet and tag it correctly. After this the new music is placed in the correct place on your disk and is already in your library and ready to use together with iTunes. To do the same with SlimServer you will have to: 1. Download an external tagging application, none is recommended so you will have to find and choose one for your self 2. You will have to choose which file format to choose, again none is officially recommended so you will have to choose among those supported by SlimServer 3. You will have to learn the settings of your external tagging application to make sure the tagging and ripping is done correctly. As an example if you like to use EAC and FLAC, which is one of the combinations recommended on the forum, it isn't setup automatically. You will have to find a tutorial how to setup EAC and FLAC, none is officially recommended. 4. After ripping you will have to make sure your music is stored in a place where SlimServer will find it. In iTunes this is done automatically. 5. You will have to realize that you must actually perform a rescan to get SlimServer to know the new music. After you have successfully gone through all this it is time to start worrying about the basic/advanced settings in SlimServer. This is the time where you will realize that you have tagged your music incorrectly to make it work with the basic settings in SlimServer, so you will have to learn the advanced settings to make it work correctly. Now, I'm not saying that SlimServer should be a tagging software. I'm just saying that average Joe will probably have problem with this tagging and ripping part of the process, especially since there is very little information and recommendations related to this in a place where it can easily be found by average Joe. The information exist for sure, both in the forum and on the wiki, but it isn't that easy to find in case you don't know where to look. Another problem is that there is just to many options in this tagging/ripping part of the process. I personally have no problem with this since I have learned how to do it and have my own process I go through after buying new music, but new users probably doesn't have this. I also think one of the major reasons for the problems we are seeing on the forums, is this non existing tagging/ripping process. The problem is that people tag and rip their music differently and SlimServer needs to support and handle all the different variations of ripping and tagging. I'm not saying that this is bad, because it means that SlimServer is very flexible, but it costs a lot of money for Logitech that could be used for more useful stuff. A suggestion is that Logitech starts to look for some specific tagging/ripping software which could be bundled together with SlimServer. This way the instructions could be a lot more detailed and you could say "Do like this" instead of saying "You can do it this way or you can do it that way or...". Other applications than the bundled can still be supported, but average Joe will probably choose to use the bundled application and this should get rid of many problems. Now when I have said all this, I also like to say that the SlimServer/SqueezeBox combination has been the biggest improvement of my personal music listening since the time I went from LP to CD player. -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.homeip.net) 'My download page' (http://erland.homeip.net/download) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library and RandomPlayList plugins' (http://wiki.erland.homeip.net/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35906 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
