What if Logitech pulls the plug

[mlsstl]

yeah, thats right, b/c you're the one coming on here and acting like the rest of us have no place to speak, and then get all huffy when we don't agree with you.

take it easy, francis!

I reread my original comments and you're taking offense where none was intended. There is nothing I wrote that said you were wrong. I just pointed out that when one is watching as a consumer on the outside, there are a lot of things we don't know. There are explanations other than yours that are quite possible.

Rather that state with great certainty, as you did, that "this is what happened" or "the company should have done this instead", I pointed out there are a lot of facts unknown to those outside management that may alter the picture being painted. There is a big difference between my providing alternative possibilities and your claim that I said you were wrong.

Can you point out the sentence where I told you or others not to speak or that you were wrong? I don't think you'll find it unless you have an unusually active imagination that doesn't require much material to weave an over sensitive response.

Since this is a rather meaningless discussion in terms of changing how the world works, I think I'll bow out now.

Thanks for an interesting discussion.

[banned for life]

And IMHO that's a much bigger issue than the fact that we haven't got any new Squeezebox hardware the last 2 years, I think some advertising that made people aware of the existence of the Squeezebox products would make a big difference.

In the US. The media is infatuated with Sonos despite the high price. Call it the Bose factor. (This is true despite the Sonos/SB similarity in that a PC of some kind must be running for local music access.)

Despite it's lack of remote support, it's just a matter of time before Airplay overwhelms SB. This is due to a casual disregard for music quality and the inevitability of the expansion of iCloud to larger free accommodations. Along these lines, the Touch is a misplaced product. The display is too small to make it useful across the room and by the same token you can't cable it to the real stereo on the other side of the room. There has to be a high quality audio product like the Receiver that sells for just under US $100. TinySBS was a real waste of resources.

With an emphasis on remote (read phones/tablets) access and enhancements to MYSB.com to make this process simpler, the spiral might be slowed. If anything can be taught, LT's snubbing software players has to end. People would be eager to gain access to everything if it were adequately explained.

Also, ditch the "picture/video" aspect until you are ready to fully implement remote access.

bfl

[mll]

Very interesting read, everyone (although i confess I skipped on the DLNA debate .

I'm not a frequent reader of this forum. I actually stumbled upon this thread while trying to know when smart lists would be implemented, confident as I was in the way Logitech (or rather Slimdevices) would keeb LMS at the spearhead of audio diffusion innovation. My trust waned a bit when I read the roadmap at http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Software_Roadmap which is obviously obsolete (last update of this map is in march 2011). I then came to this forum to see how the beta builds were going. Slowly at best it seemed. So I checked staff (at least the couple of forum users I know are staff) activity on the forum. Worrying. Finally, this thread that deals on Logitech pulling the plug. If it was purely theoretical I guess it wouldn't be discussed.

Well, I guess I won't listen to smart playlists on my LMS anytime soon.

[erland]

Very interesting read, everyone (although i confess I skipped on the DLNA debate .

I'm not a frequent reader of this forum. I actually stumbled upon this thread while trying to know when smart lists would be implemented, confident as I was in the way Logitech (or rather Slimdevices) would keeb LMS at the spearhead of audio diffusion innovation. My trust waned a bit when I read the roadmap at http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Software_Roadmap which is obviously obsolete (last update of this map is in march 2011). I then came to this forum to see how the beta builds were going. Slowly at best it seemed. So I checked staff (at least the couple of forum users I know are staff) activity on the forum. Worrying. Finally, this thread that deals on Logitech pulling the plug. If it was purely theoretical I guess it wouldn't be discussed.

Just remember that nobody in this thread probably have much clues regarding what's going on inside Logitech, the only strong indications I'm aware of are:
1. Logitech isn't doing much marketing/advertising of the Squeezebox devices and as far as I know they have never done so.
2. Logitech seems to try to hire new people and they do mention Squeezebox in the descriptions of the new roles.
3. Logitech have decreased their activities in the community, it's pretty clear that they are doing more work in-house these days and have less interaction with the community.

Everyone have to do their own interpretation of this but I don't think we should consider Squeezebox to be dead just because we don't see much activities from the outside, there might be a lot of stuff going on inside Logitech which we aren't aware of.

Well, I guess I won't listen to smart playlists on my LMS anytime soon.

Depends, if you are willing to purchase some third party plugins you can get it already today by installing SQL Playlist, Dynamic Playlist and License Manager plugin and purchase real license to SQL Playlist or get a free 30 day evaluation license.

[mll]

Depends, if you are willing to purchase some third party plugins you can get it already today by installing SQL Playlist, Dynamic Playlist and License Manager plugin and purchase real license to SQL Playlist or get a free 30 day evaluation license.

That's an option, especially if the smart lists planned for the v8 on the wiki never comes. We'll see...

[garym]

Finally, this thread that deals on Logitech pulling the plug. If it was purely theoretical I guess it wouldn't be discussed.
(

I suspect discussion on forums has zero correlation with likelihood of ending this product.

[aubuti]

Well, I guess I won't listen to smart playlists on my LMS anytime soon.

As Erland noted, you can have smart playlists today by using his SQL Playlist, Dynamic Playlist and License Manager plugins. Or MusicIP may be an option for you, with or without the Spicefly Sugarcube plugin. Erland's plugins use a rules-based approach, where you explicitly write the rules. In MusicIP and Sugarcube the rules are a bit more of a black box, like the way Pandora generates playlists.

MusicIP can be a challenge to set up, and its developer did pull the plug some time ago. But it still works quite well.

[fairyliquidizer]

As Erland noted, you can have smart playlists today by using his SQL Playlist, Dynamic Playlist and License Manager plugins. Or MusicIP may be an option for you, with or without the Spicefly Sugarcube plugin. Erland's plugins use a rules-based approach, where you explicitly write the rules. In MusicIP and Sugarcube the rules are a bit more of a black box, like the way Pandora generates playlists.

MusicIP can be a challenge to set up, and its developer did pull the plug some time ago. But it still works quite well.

MusicIP works just fine. Sugarcube is a nice plugin. I haven't used any of Erland's plugins other than Trackstat and Licence Manager but I'm sure they are all good. My view is the ecosystem is excellent for me. It would be perfectly fine without the extras but the plugins make it wonderful and probably keep the size of the user base up.

"If The Sun Refused to Shine, I would still be loving you"... in other words if Logitech dropped it the server and hardware will continue to do the job and there is no rush for me to change. I have been a Slimdevices customer for a long time and I have no reason to wish to change.

As for video I am happy to use different hardware for that. I don't want a TV on while using music.

[mortslim]

I believe the Squeezeboxes are "end of life". There most likely won't be any improvements to the line hardware-wise and no new apps.

However the corporation Logitech will continue and because of the large squeezebox user base, it is very doubtful that the mysqueezebox.com service will ever disappear. Cloud hosting services are getting cheaper by the day, so it won't cost much for Logitech to maintain this database.

But there are examples in internet history for once popular services to shut down.

If it does disappear, I started a new thread as to what I consider a better alternative, as far as streaming services are concerned:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...e-Squeezeboxes

[erland]

I believe the Squeezeboxes are "end of life". There most likely won't be any improvements to the line hardware-wise and no new apps.

However the corporation Logitech will continue and because of the large squeezebox user base, it is very doubtful that the mysqueezebox.com service will ever disappear. Cloud hosting services are getting cheaper by the day, so it won't cost much for Logitech to maintain this database.

If we assume you are correct regarding Squeezebox "end of life" (which I don't think you are, at least not yet), my belief is that there are three reasons for Logitech to keep mysqueezebox.com running after stop selling Squeezeboxes:
- To avoid breaking previously sold Squeezeboxes which are still under warranty period.
- If they can earn money on keeping it up and running (I doubt this is the case if they don't sell new Squeezebox hardware and don't keep services provided by mysqueezebox.com working).
- If they can make mysqueezebox.com work with non Squeezebox hardware and due to this earn money indirectly on it by selling new non Squeezebox hardware.

Keeping it running even at low costs just to keep customers happy is unlikely to happen unless they earn money on it or unless they get increased costs by shutting it down (through a lot of warranty returns). So from my perspective this means that after the last Squeezebox is sold they will likely try to keep mysqueezebox.com running for 1-3 years and then shut it down unless they can make it work with non Squeezebox hardware.

However, even without mysqueezebox.com, I'm not that worried about support for streaming services, because if Logitech doesn't provide support for them I'm fairly sure that there are service providers which are interested in letting some third party developer offer support for their service on the Squeezebox platform when Logitech's solution stops to work. Similar to the support we have already today for Spotify with Triode's Spotify plugin.

Of course, this whole discussion is very theoretical because Logitech are still selling Squeezeboxes and just a few months ago they scaled up mysqueezebox.com to be able to handle higher load and they are trying to hire additional people where they mention Squeezebox in the role descriptions.