Originally Posted by ncpl
So, SBox can be exactly plug n play. However, if you want to play with the extra toys that it has then that's a user choice. They aren't very hard to manage. e.g. BBC player.
Thanks for pitching in with an alternative view Nick. I know I'm more technically saavy than most and just didn't want to come across overly pro-Squeezebox. If people think that the SB is relatively plug and play for the simple things, then great.

FWIW, I had a proper play with Erland Isaakson's CustomBrowse and MultiLibrary plug-ins and they are VERY powerful indeed. Powerful enough to handle classical music in a completely different way to non-classical. For example, instead of a single top-level menu item for my CD Library, I now have a menu for "Classical CDs" and a menu for "Non-Classical CDs". Under Classical CDs, I have sub-menus for Composer, Conductor, Artist and Album; because composer comes from the "Composer" tag, I don't need to make "Beethoven" an artist and so Beethoven does not appear in the artist list... Ditto conductors (if I want - not decided on that yet). For Non-Classical CDs, I have sub-menus for Artist, Album, Genre/Sub-Genre and Decade.

And I've just been playing around. You can create as many "sub-libraries" as you like using pre-defined or custom SQL queries based off the file tags. Further, you can create your own tags and have them scanned in using the CustomScan plug-in; you can make new menus from your own tags and SQL/XML queries. It's complicated, but powerful.

I ought to mention that these plug-ins are no longer free. Erland has decided that he wants some cash for them and fair play to him. Personally, I feel that a minimum donation of $50 for a lifetime license for ALL of his plug-ins is money well spent; these plug-ins transform the music searching/finding functionality of the Squeezebox proposition.

I will write all this up when I settle on a scheme.

Edit: Worth mentioning that, although the UI is not in the same league as Sooloos, the Squeezepad iPad app is very good (and much better than iPeng for iPad IMO).

Last edited by VirusKiller; 2011-10-10 08:24.
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