I thought I'd add my own opinion to this discussion (which I think is a
good one).
It seems to me that slimserver/squeezecentre exists primarily as
software to serve digital music to hardware over a network, wired or
unwired. In its vanilla form it does exactly this and it does it well
(in my experience on a number of platforms.) The difficulties that
occur are more normally to do with networking, mapping drives and
installing the software on platforms that aren't necessarily
appropriately powerful or configured - this isn't slimdevices problem
but more an issue of the technical environment.
It is also open source and this is both its great strength and
weakness. It's open source nature means that it is highly flexible and
the community, together with Slimdevices/Logitech, are able to make it
do additional stuff. This flexibility though means that many
technically illiterate people (I would class myself as a semi-geek in
that I am willing to tinker, and enjoy doing so, but I don't know much
about programming, perl, chroot, CLI etc) see all the cool stuff that
is possible but don't have the skills, or interest, to dabble. It is
frustrating to see that you can do X but when you try it doesn't work
because it is not just a case of downloading software and it self
installing.
In terms of hardware I believe that the Squeezebox is an awesome bit of
kit and the introduction of Transporter and now the Controller and
Receiver makes a great all round package that suits all sorts of people
with different needs - I can see a need for all of these in my home.I
also suspect that Squeezebox 4 (is there such a thing?) will also be
innovative and further compliment the range.
Whats my point? Well I suppose it is that you can't keep all of the
people happy all of the time but the core software and hardware is
fantastic and does what it is supposed to do and has the added
advantage of being organic in its ability to evolve and meet the needs
of us, the community. So as long as the core functionality exists, and
works well, I am happy.
Finally I would like to thank Logotech/Slimdevices because they
genuinley take an interest in their product and, in my opinion, stay
focussed on what it is that they should and shouldn't do. It is also to
their credit that senior staff often reply in these forums to both
criticism and praise and make their views be known in an objective and
sensible manner. As a user I appreciate that.
Regards,
C
--
conorm1
conorm1's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6339
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=43491
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