Unreliable radio presets - why not store them on the radio?

[mr-b]

Hi

I have just bought a Radio for my mother. Unfortunately she is on the point of rejecting it due to the preset buttons' behaviour being very unpredictable compared to presets on a conventional radio. Her simple requirement is for pressing a preset to play a radio station.

Specifically she has found that presets for radio stations are unreliable (sometimes they are lost altogether) or she has to fiddle about with various menu settings in order to get them to work again (or else she has to navigate to the station manually). All of this is severely denting the otherwise useful features that the Radio offers.

She has LMS on a PC which goes to sleep after some time (or else is shut down at night). I've read a few threads and it seems to be a common problem.
One issue seems to be that the presets are apparently stored on both LMS and mysqueezebox.com. The documentation does not mention this.

So I thought I could cover all eventualities by storing the same presets on both services. I did this by storing them while 1) LMS is selected as the music library and 2) while MSB.com is selected. I also made switching to MSB.com a home menu option. Unfortunately it seems that this still does not result in a simple user experience.

Examples:

If the radio was previously connected to LMS and the LMS PC is now asleep or off, then selecting a preset results in a LMS Problem Connecting error. It prompts to switch libraries, but doing this only results in yet another Problem Connecting error. :-(
Recovery involves manually navigating to the option to switch to MSB.com.

If the radio is playing a radio station and it was previously connected to LMS, and now the PC is asleep or off, then merely changing vol level results in another "Problem Connecting" error, with the same tortuous unintuitive navigation to resolve the issue.

I can appreciate that it is really a pain to have to keep switching to MSB.com every time there is an error or even by pre-empting it by selecting MSB.com before using the radio at all.

Considering the way that this is all apparently operating, as a general principle it just strikes me as very odd to store effectively the same information across multiple remote resources whose availability varies, and also to lack any effective failover between them, either automatic or prompted.

One option that makes much more sense to me is to store the presets locally on the radio. Does anyone know what the reasons are for the current system? It seems a shame to spoil the user experience by varying so much from the established preset operation of a "normal radio".

[castalla]

Why the need to flip back and forwards between LMS and msb ?

For all normal purposes (internet radio) msb is perfectly adequate.

The only real need for LMS is to play music.

Or leave lms running 24/7 .... ?

One issue with the preset buttons is that they are very time sensitive - more than a second push and the button is reassigned.

An alternative would be to set up Favourites.

[mr-b]

The radio is used for both internet radio and stored music, so it has to switch between them. LMS is on a PC in a bedroom so that is why it has to be turned off at night! Also it's too much power to leave on 24/7.

Favourites are a possible backup, but these are also stored depending on what the radio is connected to, so I'm not sure how they simplify the issues. The simplicity of presets that can be operated easily by touch at night (say) is important.

Again my impression is that all the issues could be solved by just storing the preset info on the radio.

[JJZolx]

One option that makes much more sense to me is to store the presets locally on the radio. Does anyone know what the reasons are for the current system? It seems a shame to spoil the user experience by varying so much from the established preset operation of a "normal radio".

Yeah, reliance on a server for such a basic task makes the whole system more than a little bit shaky.

It's probably because that's how the older players worked. They were a lot dumber than the SqueezePlay based players, Radio and Touch. Plus, the Touch and Radio don't have much extra flash storage space.

I suspect that if they were to start all over, didn't have to support the older players, and were working with devices that weren't crippled by having too little memory and CPU power, they might have taken a different approach.

[Zimberto]

I like my SB radio, but I wouldn't buy one for my mother. It needs at least one more major revision to move out of the technogeek realm. The radio is halfway usable by a dumbass, but there's still enough to go wrong to bewilder the technically challenged. I don't think the problems are insurmountable, but only someone like Steve Jobs could actually put it right, and last I heard he was dead. There is ZERO chance of Logitech getting it right. I mean, look at their remote controls!! LOL!

[mr-b]

Well I do recall that a concerted effort made the Radio alarms much more reliable a while back, so these things can change (pending the exhumation of Mr Jobs!).

I searched the bug db but couldn't find anything so filed one:

Presets are unreliable - need to store on device or implement LMS/MSB.com failover
http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17912

Please vote or add comments.

[jzelle]

Why the need to flip back and forwards between LMS and msb ?

For all normal purposes (internet radio) msb is perfectly adequate.

The only real need for LMS is to play music.

Or leave lms running 24/7 .... ?

One issue with the preset buttons is that they are very time sensitive - more than a second push and the button is reassigned.

An alternative would be to set up Favourites.

The time sensitivity of the preset buttons can be fixed by "locking" them as follows:

go to Settings/Advanced/Beta features/shortcuts/preset key press 1/select-play preset 1
and then go to Settings/Advanced/Beta features/shortcuts/preset key hold 1/select-disabled

This will lock preset 1, repeat for all the other preset buttons. Realize of course that to change a particular preset in the future the "press key hold" will have to set back to default first.

In my case I have locked presets 1 to 5 this way and for preset 6 I have set the "press key hold" function to "favorites" thus putting favorites on the spinwheel for a long press on button 6.

[Mnyb]

Supose you can have preset that only work on LMS and presets that only worked on mysb.com

Example a local files and the oficial spotify app .

You may even assign randomplay to a preset in LMS .

If stored on the radio you will have another set of confused users wondering about that .

It could possibly be mitigated by WOL to the local server or switch to mysb.com by each preset .

But the WOL behavior takes some learning , if it is a cold boot of the server, player times out and show all manners of distressed messages ,untill it suddenly works when server comes online, then you may have to press the preset again .

Some may see it as a feature too running multiple servers