After reading some forum posts, scouring a pile of websites, hunting for SVN servers with client (appliance) code, and even looking at the docs, I still don't know the answers to some very basic questions:
* ISTR from the one time I've seen an internet radio appliance used (a Revo Pico, I think -- Reciva-based), the UI for browsing stations involved navigating a shallow hierarchy of categories using a combined knob + button. Is the SB UI for selecting stations the same? Is it easy to search for stations by entering a text search term? Does the text search feature actually work well? * "Plugins" run on the SBS host -- right? * "Apps" run on the appliance, and don't depend on SBS -- right? * Is there any common UI provided by all apps? May an app (also) provide a custom UI? Is there a mix of web and appliance UI involved here? Specifically, if I install, for example, the "AccuRadio" app, do a bunch of new stations show up in the Big Tree of Radio Stations that the appliance lets me choose from? Or do I have to learn a different user interface for each app? * Would it be feasible, technically and legally, for another company or other organisation to set up in competition with mysqueezebox.com? Do Logitech make this easy or difficult? SBS and mysqueezebox.com provide non-identical functionality -- right? * If I want access to a "fairly comprehensive" set of radio stations (say, similar to the list that Reciva offers), do I have to install a whole bunch of "apps"? Do I have to jump through lots of web registration hoops to do that? How does this compare to the situation with Reciva-based radio appliances? How much of a pain have you found this to be? * Ogg Vorbis and WMA support does not require SBS -- right? * AAC support requires SBS -- right? * Is flash supported? Is SBS required for this? * Is RealAudio supported? Is SBS required for this? * Roughly what proportion of internet radio stations require AAC, RealAudio or flash? To be honest, this is mostly out of curiosity by now: I suspect that the fact that the "Sales FAQ" link I found was broken was the last straw for me. Well, that and the fact that the main thing I was looking for to distinguish this from Reciva-based radios was hardware that won't turn into a brick if the company goes out of business or behaves badly / incompetently -- but it seems it doesn't do much better on that score than the Reciva-based radios. ISTM that companies that sell appliances -- especially those based on open-source -- have missed out on a trick by not publishing a short primer for geeks. Geeks do some of your word-of-mouth marketing for you, people, and we really, honestly, don't want to read reams of confused mass-market marketing spam in order to find out pretty much **** all. Write the answers to the questions above in a text file (it'll occupy oh, maybe a whole side of A4 paper when printed out), title it something suitably scary, and put it on your website. Even just commit at top level of SBS SVN if you can't bear to put it anywhere else. Thanks -- dial ------------------------------------------------------------------------ dial's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=35062 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=72771 _______________________________________________ Radio mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/radio
