I thought I'd add my own opinion to this discussion (which I think is a good one).
It seems to me that slimserver/squeezecentre exists primarily as software to serve digital music to hardware over a network, wired or unwired. In its vanilla form it does exactly this and it does it well (in my experience on a number of platforms.) The difficulties that occur are more normally to do with networking, mapping drives and installing the software on platforms that aren't necessarily appropriately powerful or configured - this isn't slimdevices problem but more an issue of the technical environment. It is also open source and this is both its great strength and weakness. It's open source nature means that it is highly flexible and the community, together with Slimdevices/Logitech, are able to make it do additional stuff. This flexibility though means that many technically illiterate people (I would class myself as a "semi-geek" in that I am willing to tinker, and enjoy doing so, but I don't know much about programming, perl, chroot, CLI etc) see all the cool stuff that is possible but don't have the skills, or interest, to dabble. It is frustrating to see that you can do X but when you try it doesn't work because it is not just a case of downloading software and it self installing. In terms of hardware I believe that the Squeezebox is an awesome bit of kit and the introduction of Transporter and now the Controller and Receiver makes a great all round package that suits all sorts of people with different needs - I can see a need for all of these in my home.I also suspect that Squeezebox 4 (is there such a thing?) will also be innovative and further compliment the range. Whats my point? Well I suppose it is that you can't keep all of the people happy all of the time but the core software and hardware is fantastic and does what it is supposed to do and has the added advantage of being organic in its ability to evolve and meet the needs of us, the community. So as long as the core functionality exists, and works well, I am happy. Finally I would like to thank Logotech/Slimdevices because they genuinley take an interest in their product and, in my opinion, stay focussed on what it is that they should and shouldn't do. It is also to their credit that senior staff often reply in these forums to both criticism and praise and make their views be known in an objective and sensible manner. As a user I appreciate that. Regards, C -- conorm1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ conorm1's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6339 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=43491 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
