LST observations from an IT pro perspective

[chill]

Strange!? I found the SB system very easy to install and use.

But when it comes to iPhones and iTunes.... everytime my wife or kids wants help with the iStuff I feel like banging my head to the wall.

+1

It's better now, but for a year or two it felt like every major holiday would have to have a few days set aside to get iTunes working properly again. I've had to give up and reimport all my media numerous times, each time spending valuable down time googling for scripts that will preserve ratings/play counts etc, sorting 'movies' into TV series and genuine movies, making lists of iPhone apps so that I can reinstall them when they inevitably didn't reload automatically.....ugh. I've finally managed to get everybody in the house working with a central media location and separate libraries built on each laptop. But if I want to visit the App store on my laptop when I'm away from home, so either the library file or the individual media files are inaccessible, then I know I'm in for trouble.

Every time I hear about bad experiences with LMS I mentally compare it to the nightmare I've had with iTunes over the years. And it's not just me - each time I google for the solution to the next problem with iTunes, there are limitless posts from people with the same problem, or a slightly different one. iTunes is undoubtedly the worst thing Apple do. It's slightly better on a Mac, which is unfortunate since iTunes on a Windows PC is often the only experience of Apple that people in Microsoftland will have. I've come to the conclusion that Apple and Microsoft don't mix - just as iTunes under Windows is a challenge, Office 2011 is the worst performing software on my Mac.

If only everything was as simple as LMS!

[rayman1701]

Wow I just must be lucky, which if you knew my health history, you wouldn't think so I knew absolutely nothing about Squeezebox, or heck even "networked" music players when I bought my Touch a little over a couple of years ago, all I knew is I wanted to have an easy to setup server with a stand alone player, so I wouldn't have to sit in front of a computer to choose & play the music. When I heard about the Touch and the fact it would also accept USB hard drives for the possibility of not needing a computer I was in. Now I happened to hear about it before it was released, since it was delayed for quite a while. But finally there it was, so I ordered one as soon as I could. I had just finished the 4 month task of ripping everything to lossless and just needed a player. When I was waiting for it to come, I discovered this site and did a bit of reading and set up sb.com passwords & stuff like that. When it arrived I had it set up and running in very short order, and even though I was worried that it might not have enough power to handle large libraries, I tried the scan of the USB hard drive with over 54,000 tracks of ALAC. When the scan finished, it kinda worked but as I feared just wasn't that good of an experience with a large library, not to mention that 96/24 stuff seemed to choke it down. So it was on to plan B, now I was a bit nervous about how hard to set up SBS (at the time) was gonna be, but I just went for it. Didn't have any idea on plugins 3rd party or official, or any of this stuff. SBS installed easily and I did the scan for music, and everything showed up and I was playing music without needing any coding, or figuring out ip addresses, just pretty much plug and play for me. Then I started devouring this forum, finding out what more this little baby could do, figured out some plugins that sounded handy and got them set up without issue. Now I still don't know how the guts of the system works, and if someone talks about SHH ing into the Touch to change something on the player, or doing things in Linux, my eyes glass over and they might as well be speaking Ferengi for all I know. The most frustrating thing that happens to me is when weather.com changes something and it breaks the SuperDateTime plugin. So I guess I am lucky.

And the same thing with iTunes. I've had very few problems with iTunes in all the years I've been using it, and yes I'm on Windows. But I've also gotten in the habit of waiting a bit for updates, just to make sure there aren't major problems, although it's sometimes hard to tell since the iTunes forums seems to have issues with every release. But thankfully, 99% of the time it just works for me.

So while my doctors would probably laugh their butts off, I just must be lucky.

Maybe since I didn't have that kind of computer experience, my expectations were not the same as the OP's. I wouldn't trade my Touch for anything else on the market that I've seen at this point. It does everything I want & more, plus it is robust enough so that I won't bump into track limits (I'm up to 59,500 new, which is getting close to the Sonos limit).

But I do agree that there should be better documentation that comes with it, or a downloadable manual. But that can be said about a lot of companies products these days. And since LMS is supported on so many different configurations, it might be impossible to have something that covers it all and do so in competent manner. I know of people who just can't for the life of them read and understand the manual for a modern day A/V receiver! So maybe it's best to have somewhere like this where they can ask & get answers for specific questions.

[ftldny@gmail.com]

On 7/4/2012 3:58 AM, chill wrote:
> Every time I hear about bad experiences with LMS I mentally compare it
> to the nightmare I've had with iTunes over the years.

As you note, iTunes for Windows has to be one of the slowest, buggiest,
most oversized and unintuitive programs ever written. Half the time
when I load iTunes it can't even find my iPhone, even though it's
plainly visible and accessible in Computer.

--
Bill

[Mnyb]

Similar experience here in 2006

it took 30 minutes ,but it was piont to piont wifi with my PC in internet sharing mode ,that was saturday (had to learn how that worked).

But after i figured what a LAN was and got a router ? I actually took my bike down to town and fetched whatever was avaible on a sunday .
some reading up what that router thingy was suposed to do (the ADSL modem I had then had only one port ) later on monday it had my first real system .

But when my first router was up and running properly, it just worked to connect the SB3 ,server was installed and running and i just fiddled with the remote and the SB3 sugested my server and that was it.