What's the objective here? Just to provide replacement hardware for existing users or to grow the whole Squeezebox user-ship?
If the latter then I think you need to start with a self-contained appliance. I assume that everyone here is either running a server on the likes of an NAS, a commercial server, a self-built server (including me) or a desktop left switched on all the time. That isn't likely to be the profile of potential new users. A device that simply plays streams from a piece of kit the user doesn't have wouldn't make sense. If Logitech couldn't make money out of the product line I think the lack of a ready-made server must have been a factor. What would make sense to a wider potential user-ship would be a box which looks like an existing piece of domestic electronics kit, allows existing CD collections to be ripped and stored, acts as a front end for on-line purchases, doesn't need mouse, keyboard or screen, allows web-management of the collection and plays the collection through existing audio kit. That would be a useful piece of kit in its own right and the potential to stream to other devices would be an add-on. To some extent this sounds like the Vortexbox but in terms of a consumer device I think Fedora is probably the wrong base. Debian stable or a RHEL clone would be better. Or maybe even BSD. Also I'm not sure what tools Vortexbox provides for managing the collection. On my own server, because it runs headless, I use MPD plus an MPD web client that provides tag editing and another web application for file management, neither of which are as slick as I'd like nor are they integrated with each other or with the Squeezebox server. There's scope for extending the LMS or whatever it's called this week (the constant name changes can scarcely have helped sell the product) with such facilities. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ igoddard's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=52055 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97881 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
