I installed SC on my computer, and the Touch did respond much faster and I experienced no slow down.
I do think that some of the slowness I experienced with the SB when running off a SC from a slow system can be improved significantly. For example, when I press 'shuffle', 'repeat', or do volume adjustment, the reason it feels very sluggish is because the UI is not asynchronous. The UI only seems to get updated after the SB gets a response back from SC. This is not a good design from UI perspective. If it takes a long time to get an ACK from SC, then the UI would freeze. This can be improved significantly by having the UI in the SB reflect immediately the user selection, and in the background communicate the request to the server. This leaves room for optimization such as command queuing as well. For example, if the user presses shuffles a few times (to make sure he picks the one he really wants since it's just an icon representation), the SB only needs to send the end state, not every state change. In practical terms, the box has until the end of the current song to communicate this with the server, this could be minutes so should be plenty of time for this. When the SB is originally designed, I guess it's very expensive to put a lot of computing power on the box, so the server end up doing everything and the box only have very primitive capabilities. Now that the SB Touch runs Linux with the SC in it, why not implement a standalone mode where the SB Touch simply interfaces with a storage by reading the file directly (local or in a NAS)? Only a small subset of the SC capabilities needs to be implemented. This would free up the need to run a PC with SC 24x7 for many people. (sort of like the WDTV media player but with slightly more capability for music, playlist, shuffle, repeat, etc..) Incorporating SC into the device is a better business decision. IMHO implement a good standalone mode is a better technical option. It can basically eliminate some of the advantage of the Sonos system if reasonable amount of thoughts and works went into it. I think the current hardware is fully capable of doing this, probably a lot faster than running the SC within the Touch. Heck why not add DLNA support as well? Basically if you want the original/real SB experience, run a computer with SC on it. On the other hand if you just want basic music playback capability, run it in standalone mode. It can read music from either a NAS location, or the SD card. How is the performance with the build-in SC in the Touch? I didn't test it because the device seems to have no memory left even without starting the SC service (128mb ram). -- wildgoose ------------------------------------------------------------------------ wildgoose's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=23501 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81089 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
