Comments on: Disappointed with TiVo Home Media Music Streaming

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Fri, 13 Aug 2004 17:44:42 +0000

Alex: I have not seen that before. I’ll give it a look-see. Thanks.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 13 Aug 2004 16:50:00 +0000

Have you check out JavaHMO? I think that you will see that you will like it. It has a lot of features that the windows desktop publisher doesn't come with.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:44:01 +0000

Jeff: You hadn’t told me.

My accountant advises me that I can’t visit you for at least a month now.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:42:55 +0000

Geof:

I’m not sure I’ve told you, but I bought a Squeezebox a few months ago (sold the SliMP3 to Brian). The main reason was that the Squeezebox can play PCM (WAV) audio natively. That means that I can store files on the server in any compressed format I want. As long as the server can convert them to PCM on the fly, the Squeezebox can play them (the SliMP3 can only play MP3). So far, I’ve tried Ogg Vorbis, WAV, FLAC, and even unprotected Apple AAC files (that one takes a bit of hacking).

Then, just Friday, I installed the graphic display upgrade that they just came out with on the Squeezebox (all new ones now come with it). See the front page of slimdevices.com for details and a picture. It’s very nice. My only complaint is that it appears that the firmware that knows about the graphical display also contains a tweak to the IR receiver code that has severely cut down on the remote control sensitivity. I’ve got a bug report in on that one.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 13:16:13 +0000

That thought did occur to me, Grant. I’ll probably wait and see for a month or two, because I don’t have some of the other equipment I’d want to have before I could begin to appreciate a Squeezebox.

By: Grant Stevens

Grant Stevens — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 12:46:13 +0000

I have to agree completely. If nothing else, it’s badly missing a “Play this song next” option. All I can suggest is, be patient/slack-off some more, because Tivo will probably fix it. Since the home media options became standard, I’ve already noticed some improvements in the handling of .m3u playlists. (The original rev of the software I had couldn’t cope with them at all.) I have to agree, though, they do feel half-baked, and I’m glad I didn’t spend any extra money to receive them.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 03:09:37 +0000

Oh, I have no problem with creating playlists of my own, and I typically listen album-by-album anyway. The issue is that it wouldn’t seem to take very much overhead to program a playlist on the TiVo and have it stored either on the box or back at the computer doing the streaming, but it’s just not happening like that.

I mean, you can’t even queue up a song. If one song is playing, and you back out to set up another song to play, the second song will start playing immediately. It feels rushed and hackneyed, which is totally out-of-line with the rest of my TiVo experience.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 03:05:49 +0000

Check out the mood logic software. It allows you to set up playlists and do things like random play based on LOTS of different stuff. I am still on my 14 day free trail so I don’t know everything about it yet, but I really like it so far.