Squeeze family and classical music

[azaz44]

Hello everyone

I would like to propose some requests which would make products better for classical music lovers. I own Squeezebox Classic for a long time, and just got the Boom for the bedroom few days ago. Besides small issues I love them. I spent long hours with the "Classic" enjoying and studying the music, and it's just great. I hope this is the right place to post, as I see no place for the Classic here.

Here are some key points of classical music collections. Typically:

- The collections are huge.

- No tags. There's no standarized way of tagging files, no support anywhere in software for all these information (orchestra, conductor, soloists, pianists, composer, work, choir and more), possibly also to much data to enter.

- A lot of subdirectories. There's a lot of recordings and they need to be organized somehow, different composers, then works, interpretations, versions etc etc. It can easily get 10 subfolders deep.

- Complicated structures sometimes. Once it is Beethoven / V Symphony (Bernstein) / files.flac, another time it is Beethoven / Orchestral works / Symphonies / No. 5 / Bernstein + Some Orchestra [Year] / files.flac. You need more subdivisions if you have more recordings.

Now, what I think would make the software better, and what are some problems.

1. It would be great to have some option, to get rid of these menus: Artists, Albums, Years, Genres etc. Menus are well organized, but still it could be easier to find items. Removing any unneeded item is good. The only one I use, when being in "Browse" is actually "Music Folder". Currently the software allows you to customize only Main Menu items.

2. It would be so great, if the "Search" option would be able to search in folder names and file names.

3. Classical music requires active listening. You choose some work, listen to it, than choose another one - sometimes it's 30 minutes long, sometimes 3. So no playlists 3h long. This means constant switching between "Now playing" and "Browse" menus, and here squeeze products could be better. Because:

4. In the "Classic" it is not that bad, because there are "Now playing" and "Browse" buttons at the remote. However, pressing the "Browse" brings you to the root of your collection. And you need to dig into directories again, to find the place you were at 3 minutes ago. Typically you want to be in the same place you were before, because you want to listen to something from "around". And luckily the software remembers at which position you were last time for each folder. But still you have to press "right" button ten times, to go into subfolders, watching the screen carefully, to not go too far. Actially I find myself disabling the option which shows "Now playing" as a screensaver after some inactivity time, and refusing to go to "Now playing" if I know I will listen to some other recording soon. Could the "Browse" button bring you to the folder you were last time, before you went to "Now playing"?

5. In the "Boom"... Here it's a real issue. There's no "Browse" button at the remote, and no corresponding button at the front panel. Choosing new recording means going to main menu and navigating through menus to the collection. It's really complicated and makes you go sleeping instead. Additionally it's not consistent - the remote has a "home" button, so at least you can go to the main menu (or now playing) easily. The front panel doesn't, you go to the main menu with a long press of "back" button. I hope this can be solved somehow. The only option for me seems to be ordering an extra remote, with all the buttons, to use with the Boom. But my Boom is just next to me in the bedroom and I would prefer to use the front panel (which additionally is so nice). I don't know how to solve it. Is the long-press of the knob used somewhere? How about long-press of the knob switching between "Now playing" and "Browse"? (And possibly some other configurable items, other people might prefer radio stations here instead of Browse).

6. Of course it would be great to have some support for tags... But this is complicated and I think classical music lovers all agreed to live with file names. This would mean a lot of customizable menus, because you can search / group files by different things. You can start with composer, than it's work. You can start by a particular pianist and see it's works (grouped by something else later). Or you want to start with your favourite soprano signer - because this is what you want to listen to today. Or you start with some particular orchestra, because you want to compare two first class orchestras. Many options, so a lot of customization needed here. But also a lot of work for us, tagging our files, and outstanding result of grouping your collection by anything you want. Let it be a dream.

Comments and additional suggestions from classical music lovers are welcome. I hope someone from the Slim Squeeze Logitech stuff reads it and can make these great products even better.

Cheers.

[netchord]

i would just add that i find it inconceivable that there's no option to browse one's collection by composer. most PC software, whether for Mac or Win, whether iTunes, WMP, Winamp, JRiver, etc. has a composer field. many of use come to the Squeeze-iverse after building substantial collections on a PC, and I'd wager there's a very large subset who've been using iTunes to manage their collection (still the simplest media manager IMHO). if the SC can read the iTunes DB, how can it not extract the composer field? there are work-arounds, or plugins that require a considerable amount of skill and time to implement- it needs to be simpler.

second, gapless playback is still a huge problem. i have ~300 complete opera recordings, ripped as Appleloss less files. to play them gaplessly, i'd have to convert them all the AIF, a waste of bandwidth and HD space, or jettison iTunes and move to another player and convert them to flac.

iTunes supports gapless playback with Apple lossless files- why can't SC? i understand it's an issue of transcoding, but why doesn't the Duet (i have a Duet and a Boom) decode APL?

lastly, shuffle play is a feature that is very cool for popular music and jazz, but no utility for classical. if i'm listening to a jazz playlist, but decide to change to something classical, i have to navigate to the settings menu, disable shuffle play, then back to the music libray, genre, and find the tracks i want, a needlessly laborious process. again, itunes has figured this out, and can remember your shuffle settings for individual playlists- why can't SC do this?

[Phil Leigh]

Apple is a closed, proprietary system with hefty and restrictive licensing fees and other manufacturers are limited in what they can achieve. Many people here have and will continue to avoid Apple for that reason. I won't have any of their products in the house because of this - oh and my Sony Discman sounds better!

Also, their DRM-infected downloads are nothing but a PITA.

Anyway, it's pointless saying "iTunes can do Apple lossless gapless playback, why can't SB?"

Just switch to ANY other format and enjoy.

[androidtopp]

Apple is a closed, proprietary system with hefty and restrictive licensing fees and other manufacturers are limited in what they can achieve. Many people here have and will continue to avoid Apple for that reason. I won't have any of their products in the house because of this - oh and my Sony Discman sounds better!

Also, their DRM-infected downloads are nothing but a PITA.

Anyway, it's pointless saying "iTunes can do Apple lossless gapless playback, why can't SB?"

Just switch to ANY other format and enjoy.

Just a warning - you're not likely to find much Apple sympathy here - DRM is a four letter word, and Apple's closed ecosystem doesn't seem to generate many fans. Personally, I own an iPod, and I love it, but that's more than I can say for iTunes, iTunes Music Store, or any of the Apple file formats.

All that aside, I agree with you that classical support is lacking, although I'm not sure if this is down to the players, the software, the tagging capabilities, etc. I just omit most of the information that would be nice to have, and focus on composer. Granted, my collection is small enough that I have very few overlapping recordings. If I were to have more collisions where I needed to differentiate between different recordings of the same piece, I would probably be up a similar creek.

[netchord]

i agree about DRM, and while i have some stuff from the iTMS, is not what's important to me. my library is pretty large, over 12k tracks, most ripped from my own CDs, and most in lossless format. about a third of it is classical, the rest jazz and rock. but gapless playback is important in the rock world too- dark side of the moon, abbey road, etc.

and wouldn't it be nice to sort my collection by Dylan the composer, picking up all the covers i have in my library as well as the origianl dylan cds?

[fakarava2]

Hello everyone

I would like to propose some requests which would make products better for classical music lovers. I own Squeezebox Classic for a long time, and just got the Boom for the bedroom few days ago. Besides small issues I love them. I spent long hours with the "Classic" enjoying and studying the music, and it's just great. I hope this is the right place to post, as I see no place for the Classic here.

Here are some key points of classical music collections. Typically:
/../
Cheers.

I agree with you.
Some of these problems can be solved by plugins from Erland :
http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.ph...lassical_music

[CatBus]

Tagging classical music is possible, albeit time-consuming. The best thing about FLAC-style tags is that you can make up custom tags, suited exactly for your browsing/listening style. (e.g. want a special FRIEND tag for when you personally know one of the performers? not a problem! a special WIFEHATESTHIS tag for musical disagreements? sure! okay, these are ridiculous examples, but they show the flexibility) Once your music is tagged it's actually quite nice (combined with the custom scan/custom browse plugins, linked above). I'm not sure if I'm alone, but here's one classical music lover who could not abide browsing file/folder names.

A lot of users have issues with the Boom remote, and luckily the Boom works with any Slim IR remote--just order one and you can get that Browse button.

Various suggestions for improvement to the Browse Music Folder interface would probably be appreciated by SlimDevices though. As far as I know it's the "fallback" browsing interface for when your music isn't tagged, but there may be some other common scenarios where people need it.

[maggior]

second, gapless playback is still a huge problem. i have ~300 complete opera recordings, ripped as Appleloss less files. to play them gaplessly, i'd have to convert them all the AIF, a waste of bandwidth and HD space, or jettison iTunes and move to another player and convert them to flac.

iTunes supports gapless playback with Apple lossless files- why can't SC? i understand it's an issue of transcoding, but why doesn't the Duet (i have a Duet and a Boom) decode APL?

Gapless is a big thing with me. And yes, it impacts more than just classical/opera fans - any live recording is affected.

I won't reiterate the points already made regarding Apple.

You can use dbPowerAmp to batch convert you Apple lossless files to whatever format you want (FLAC, mp3, etc.) (unless you are a Mac user).

I am an iPod user too. The common denominator I came up with was Lame mp3. It plays fully gapless on both SC (with the latest SC software) and iTunes/iPods. Depending on how you use your iPod (car, earbuds, etc.) you may not even be able to hear a difference between mp3 and lossless files on the iPod. I can't.

With cheap disc space available now, I will be moving to using FLAC for SC server and having a copy of the library in LAME mp3 for my iPod.

What would be ideal is if Apple chose to support FLAC, but that ain't gonna happen in my lifetime :-). (Though with older iPods (5.5G and older), you can use a 3rd party FW called RockBox that supports FLAC.

[maggior]

Hello everyone

I would like to propose some requests which would make products better for classical music lovers. I own Squeezebox Classic for a long time, and just got the Boom for the bedroom few days ago. Besides small issues I love them. I spent long hours with the "Classic" enjoying and studying the music, and it's just great. I hope this is the right place to post, as I see no place for the Classic here.

Here are some key points of classical music collections. Typically:

- The collections are huge.

- No tags. There's no standarized way of tagging files, no support anywhere in software for all these information (orchestra, conductor, soloists, pianists, composer, work, choir and more), possibly also to much data to enter.

- A lot of subdirectories. There's a lot of recordings and they need to be organized somehow, different composers, then works, interpretations, versions etc etc. It can easily get 10 subfolders deep.

- Complicated structures sometimes. Once it is Beethoven / V Symphony (Bernstein) / files.flac, another time it is Beethoven / Orchestral works / Symphonies / No. 5 / Bernstein + Some Orchestra [Year] / files.flac. You need more subdivisions if you have more recordings.

There is work underway to rework the underlying database schema. It seems to me that issues like this could partly be addressed there. Currently the schema update is targeted for SC 8.0. If you pop into the beta and developers forums, you will see discussions there. You might want to add your 2 cents (or euros, pence, etc.) to the discussion regarding the points you raise here.

I know that, in general, tagging of classical works is a hotly debated topic; this is not a slim devices specific issue. Though the navigation is a different story.

[netchord]

Gapless is a big thing with me. And yes, it impacts more than just classical/opera fans - any live recording is affected.

I won't reiterate the points already made regarding Apple.

You can use dbPowerAmp to batch convert you Apple lossless files to whatever format you want (FLAC, mp3, etc.) (unless you are a Mac user).

I am an iPod user too. The common denominator I came up with was Lame mp3. It plays fully gapless on both SC (with the latest SC software) and iTunes/iPods. Depending on how you use your iPod (car, earbuds, etc.) you may not even be able to hear a difference between mp3 and lossless files on the iPod. I can't.

With cheap disc space available now, I will be moving to using FLAC for SC server and having a copy of the library in LAME mp3 for my iPod.

What would be ideal is if Apple chose to support FLAC, but that ain't gonna happen in my lifetime :-). (Though with older iPods (5.5G and older), you can use a 3rd party FW called RockBox that supports FLAC.

for me, the problem w/ LAME is sound quality- i've got the duet hooked up to a high-end dac/system, so lossless is the only option. i do have an iPod, and if i have to use AIF to get gapless playback, then the iPod fills up pretty quickly.

one of the earlier posts mentioned apple's closed system, but there are other media players that can playback APL files- Play, Cog, and VLC all do on the Mac, and I believe Winamp will on the PC. you just have to have QT installed.

it's not an issue of DRM. afaict, there's no good reason the duet can't support HW APL decode.