Pre-purchase questions

[adamdea]

I am a reasonably happy Touch owner and have SBS running on a NAS. I am thinking about buying a Radio for my daughter. She will want to use it as an alarm as well as playing music. I have a couple of questions.
1. Is the alarm reliable with SBS? I have had a brief skim through the forum and appreciate that there are some Very Angry People. There is some suggestion that this is because they are using mysqueezebox.com, and that SBS users were relatively happy.
Can I be reasonably confident with this solution.
I don't really want to be responsible for buying her an alarm clock that doesn't work as this will be My Fault. I can't rely on her to implement or maintain tweaky solutions. I don't want to have to get up and go into her bedroom to find out whether the Radio has worked either; otherwise I might as well give up drinking and become a responsible parent.
2 can I set up the Radio (or SBS) to access a separate My Music database of hers. Curiously she does not share my enthusiasm for Wagner and i have a lot more albums than her. This is probably not fatal because she uses napster mainly.

[JonWill]

I can answer your first question - if you are running SBS on a server the alarm is reliable (i.e. always wakes you up). Or at least has been for me. If you are trying to use a radio stream sometimes this is replaced by a system noise (awful) which, with a bit of hacking can be changed. However, waking up with music is solid. mysqueezebox.com seems to leave people approaching heart attacks...

I can't answer your second question ...

Jon

[adamdea]

Thanks, that's helpful.

[Pascal Hibon]

I have the SB Radio since a couple of days but so far the alarms did a very good job. I suspect it will continue to be because the alarms depend greatly on SBS and it has been working on my Boom flawlessly.

SBS only supports one music library.
You could separate your and her music by using playlists. But it isn’t so convenient to use playlists for that purpose.

[adamdea]

I have the SB Radio since a couple of days but so far the alarms did a very good job. I suspect it will continue to be because the alarms depend greatly on SBS and it has been working on my Boom flawlessly.

SBS only supports one music library.
You could separate your and her music by using playlists. But it isn’t so convenient to use playlists for that purpose.

Thanks. Hmmmm
I wonder whether it is possible to achieve the result by creating a custom genre(?)

[Pascal Hibon]

Well I just noticed this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=83613
It seems there is a plugin that supports two music libraries.

[adamdea]

Well I just noticed this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=83613
It seems there is a plugin that supports two music libraries.

Thank you again.

[maggior]

Creating a separate genre is a quick easy fix for separating music libraries. This assumes that your daughter doesn't care about labeling genres on her music.

I did this for my brother and his wife's music.

[davenva]

The alarm is not reliable. For over a year, it has exhibited various problems, which change randomly over time, as software updates are released.

Logitech has not fixed the problem, which stems largely from the poor design, which implements alarms as a client-server task, requiring interactions between the radio, Mysqueezebox, and your local server.

Some people claim that it works, which I suspect is related to their specific server and network setup and characteristics.

A cheap alarm clock, next to the radio has been my solution.

I would not recommend the radio for anyone needing a reliable alarm clock.

[copperstate]

The alarm is not reliable. For over a year, it has exhibited various problems, which change randomly over time, as software updates are released.

Logitech has not fixed the problem, which stems largely from the poor design, which implements alarms as a client-server task, requiring interactions between the radio, Mysqueezebox, and your local server.

Some people claim that it works, which I suspect is related to their specific server and network setup and characteristics.

A cheap alarm clock, next to the radio has been my solution.

I would not recommend the radio for anyone needing a reliable alarm clock.

Imho it greatly depends on whether ones uses mysb.com or has set up a SBS. SBS usually runs fine (my Radio has not missed an alarm in a very long time - I do have a very stable, hardwired network, though).