Hi all, After a few weeks with the Touch, I would like to share my experience:
Background: I wanted to replace our CD collection. I didn't want to switch CDs every 40..60 mins - plus there are many CDs that have only few titles I would like to listen to. Our CD player is somewhat older, without remote control, has already some problems, and a new good CD player is quite expensive. In addition buying a CD player at the moment seemed to me quite outdated. I ripped all CDs (don't know exactly how many, 400..600) to mp3 some time ago and started playing music from my laptop, transferring it to my hifi wireless via abit music adapter. That worked fine, but was not "family-friendly": I was the only one in the family who could operate this. Plus starting the laptop takes some time, so this is no real CD-player replacement. Then I saw the Touch and finally bought it. Experience: I wanted no external server, so I connected an external WD passport 500GB via USB to the Touch. I was not aware that there are so many problems with the internal server of the Touch. - Installation was really easy. Network connection is via WLAN and works fine. - I had to correct some mp3 tags and - very important - the covers. All my covers are in the corresponding album folder as folder.jpg, max. 500*500. - The Touch is always on or standby and I have no problems with the WD harddisk. It is instantly on when not power-toggling it - no boot time, just like the CD-Player. The 5W power seem to be okay for me. - I REALLY like the replaygain feature. I had to add replaygain to all music, but now it is really nice. No audio level adjustment for every CD as before (and the newer CDs are MUCH louder than the old ones). - My family can operate the Touch really easily. - I also like the random feature for selected genres. So the first impressions were very good, even with internal server. Problems began when I wanted the Touch to do some more things than just playing music. - I started a picture slideshow as screensaver. All 30GB of pictures were on the USB harddisk. That was no good idea. It crashed after some pictures (the whole screen became unresponsive), so I had to power-toggle the Touch. This was reproducable, so I don't do this any more. - I downloaded the weather app to show it as screensaver. This is nice, but took some of the few memory so once every day the internal server stopped due to low memory and had to be restarted manually by me. This reduced the acceptance of the Touch by my family quite a bit... In addition, the Touch seemed to delay the covers when playing a title and was quite "slow" in the overall behaviour. Memory usage was at approx. 89% when looking at diagnosis. - Finally I removed the weather app and - now everything is fine for at least a week. Family happy, me happy, Touch doing what it is supposed to do. Memory usage now is at approx. 73% when looking at diagnosis. Of course I would like to have the other features like a digital picture-frame (image viewer, slideshow) and an app like weather, but my main goal is to listen to music - and this is fine now. If in a later firmware version memory consumption is lower, I might try this again, but for the moment, it is okay. So with some restrictions, I am very happy with the Touch now. -- M_Meyer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ M_Meyer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=40334 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82481 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
