No Love for Squeezelite from the Industry

49 minutes ago, skikirkwood said:

I just asked the ChatGPT to cite its sources. It said was a based upon a combination of historical knowledge of the tech industry and decisions Logitech made at the time.

 

But more interesting, it suggested I check out tech publications that covered Logitech at the time such as Engadget and The Verge.

 

But most interesting was it's final suggestion was for me to browse consumer reviews and audiophile forums, and communities like Audiophile Style (formerly Computer Audiophile).

 

So this LLM is actually pointing me to this this community.

None of the sites mentioned gave permission for OpenAI to make money off the content. I block it via robots.txt, but OpenAI doesn’t care. 
 

I don’t care that it mentions my site. The value to me of that mention is less than zero versus a search engine that has an explicit goal of sending people to the site containing the info. In fact, OpenAI costs me money and makes money from the work done here. I pay writers, I spend thousands of dollars traveling the world to cover topics, and spend time away from my family. OpenAI rips it all off. I’ll never condone it unless they pay for it. 

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Still to this day, if the Squeezebox and Transporter were updated to be on par with today's hardware/software while keeping the same look and function they would give anything on the market a run for the money, if not exceed the current products. 

 

I would buy this in a heartbeat if it were on the market today. Keep in mind this is nearly 20 years old. Fitted with today's hardware and available Dac chips like ESS, or AKM nothing could touch it.

 

As someone who still has a running SBT and also occasionally uses the Material Skin, I'd have to disagree.

The SBT was great for it's time (and still is a great unit with great sound), but: technology passed it by in terms of screen size and computing power.  An RPI with a 7 inch screen (about twice the size of a SBT screen) is cheaper and better than the SBT. As are other one box solutions with screens from other vendors.

Not to mention that people today use large screens - even wall mounted. 

I think the HW stopped being manufactured and supported b/c Logitech understood that the future didn't look good for the market the SB ecosystem was building HW for. There are great solutions today that kill those HW items you seem to think couldn't be beat. Logitech knew they  weren't going to be able to compete on the HW side in the direction SB was going.

As far as SW: LMS is great. But it is too fiddly for the real mass market. You need lots of plugins, etc. to get the full benefit and all the features people expect.  That's a no no - except for computer audiophile geeks.  And try implementing inline Digital Room Correction on it. It's a nightmare. 

People here always forget that 99.5% of the market will never fiddle in any way with the stuff we do - both SW and HW. They just want to press a button and for it to work. 

The Material skin solves some of the problems of the 20 year old interface. But it is still a distant second place to Roon and some of the other interfaces out there today. 

On 8/17/2024 at 9:22 AM, firedog said:

s far as SW: LMS is great. But it is too fiddly for the real mass market. You need lots of plugins, etc. to get the full benefit and all the features people expect.  That's a no no - except for computer audiophile geeks

I think that this is one of the reasons it isn't adopted more widely. I use LMS and it is great(!) and to my knowledge the only open source solution for streaming music with a similar amount of features compared to Roon (at least if you install some plugins).

A few months ago I compared both (and their Qobuz integration) and the result was actually mixed. Some things I liked better in LMS and some in Roon.

As others have already said the sound of Squeezelite in Roon is a lot better than RAAT and Squeezelite with LMS is even better than Roon with Squeezelite.

The overall UX in Roon is of course a lot more polished and cleaner despite material skin plugin in LMS being great. My guess is this is also due to LMS being much older software than Roon. Some features people expect nowadays can be added in LMS with plugins but often you can tell it's not an integral part of the UI.

• E. g. adding a song/album to Qobuz favorites requires way too many clicks.
• Also there is no real multi user support although you can have part of it using library views. (on the other hand you can integrate multiple Qobuz accounts which is to my knowledge not possible in Roon yet)
• In my opinion the UX would need some rework which could in turn irritate users which have been using it for many years.

Moreover my impression is that it's the easiest option for manufacturers to just add (1) Roon support to their streamers because it is nowadays the dominating software among audiophiles for streaming music and then add (2) UPNP for all the people who don't want to spend on Roon (or don't like it). And as even some routers with storage attached can act as UPNP server it is (in theory) pretty simple to setup. There are also more controller apps to choose from compared to LMS/squeezelite.

I haven't used it much myself. But regarding cons I have read that

• UPNP is quite complex with many different implementations among different manufacturers leading to all sorts of problems in real usage. But others here have said they are pretty happy with Minimserver and BubbleUPNP so I guess it can be stable if done right. I myself have more experience with LSM and squeezelite and it is rock solid.
• Also to my knowledge UPNP is not being actively developed any more(?).
• Last but not least there are some plugins in LMS which together offer a great immersive experience when listening to music, e. g.
  • "Music and Artist Information" for reading about Artists and/or albums
  • "Don't stop the Music" and "LastMix" let's you have something similar to Roon Radio
  • Qobuz Plugin
  • there are also many other plugins for e. g. radio, podcasts, ...
• I don't know if I could have the same kind of functionality for my use case with UPNP (I am aware that Minimserver has many awesome features for classical music though)

Regarding streamers to use with LMS, you could of course use the UPNPBridge Plugin in LMS which would enable you to choose from a wider variety of streamers because many support UPNP. But at least in the Lyrion Community some users advice against this because of the above mentioned reliability considerations regarding UPNP: https://forums.slimdevices.com/forum/user-forums/audiophiles/1628752-lms-with-hi-end-streamer-dac#post1628798

As a side node I do know from first hand experience that the UPNP Bridge does not work with OpenHome (e. g. Lumin) because it is some kind of special implementation of UPNP.

Long story short, I think if they would modernize the UX in LMS a bit it could be a great (and open source) Roon alternative with a lot of features, great sound and reliability.

Especially the latter cannot be taken for granted, even in 2024. Just have a look at the user reviews in google playstore regarding Sonos or Kazoo ...