dial;496876 Wrote: > > * 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? >
For 'radio station' stuff, MySB uses RadioTime. Check them out at RadioTime.Com ... basically it's a "directory" (like Yahoo was back in the olden days) of radio stations, browsable different ways (by city, by format, by show). Search works reasonably well: not like you can search for an artist, but you can search for a show name or call letters. Although I usually browse to get things. > > * "Plugins" run on the SBS host -- right? > * "Apps" run on the appliance, and don't depend on SBS -- right? > Yes and No. Apps run on MySB.com and may also be on SBS. > > * 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? > MySB.com is pretty much "a multiuser version of SBS with some proprietary extensions" (usually because of licensing reasons... Some vendors may not want to give out their API without a non-disclosure, so hosting it at MySB gets around that... you can't get the source to MySB so you can't see their API...). You can certainly tell a SB of any variety "please connect to this other server" and have your own access controls if you want... I believe a couple people have done just that, running a private music server for muzak-like background sounds in businesses. > > * 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? Check out RadioTime.com ... they do a very nice job of keeping up to date: if you have stations they don't know about, they do take submissions. > > * 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? > Yes. Yes. No. No. yes. Yes (with the right plugins, I believe) > > * Roughly what proportion of internet radio stations require AAC, > RealAudio or flash? > The vast majority are mp3 or wma. > > 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. > I don't know why you believe that. If Logitech got swalled by a black hole tomorrow, the only thing I would notice missing would be last.fm, and there's an SBS plugin for that. The wife would notice Pandora missing, but that's one of those "must sign an NDA to see our API" things so it requires MySB. Ie, if you run your own server, which isn't all that difficult, most of it would work exactly the same. The odds of a multihundredbillion dollar company vanishing overnight is pretty slim, though. > > 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. I'd suggest you buy a Radio and try it. If you want to be cheap, use an SB emulator like SoftSqueeze or SqueezePlay (though they are both -emulators- and not -exactly- the same as a hardware player, they are good enough to get the gist of things) and even try SBS on a machine. I spent months hovering over the 'buy this' button before I broke down and clicked it and have never regretted it, despite suddenly needing to spend a fortune on CD's to satisfy my addictions... (When Visa calls you because a new card has 'a lot' of purchases on it... all for CD's... and wants to know if they are authorized, then, well, maybe it's time to slow down buying, and yes, that happened...) -- snarlydwarf ------------------------------------------------------------------------ snarlydwarf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1179 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=72771 _______________________________________________ Radio mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/radio
