On October 1, 2011 at 15:32, motech said...
i stopped using that internet radio card. its really useless so far.
they are just getting to adding pandora, and pandora is now no longer the hot source. its spotify. when will they have spotify support? probably when spotify is no longer hot in a year or two…
i wish i could use it as i love keeping it all crestron, just makes programming easier.
but, the squeezebox solution on crestron happens to be awesome. get 3 squeezeboxes for $300 each (plus a server of some sort in the house) and you have 3 streams of audio ranging from internet radio (much much better internet radio), pandora, spotify, and more.
I don't think it is a "useless" card. The SiriusXM stream is valuable and most large cities have the top locals on this card as streams. Two or three of these cards replace most of my AM/FM stations, replaces the need for an external antenna for SiriusXM, replaces the need for a separate SiriusXM tuner AND gives me a better quality signal (128k stream versus the 64k sat signal) PLUS Pandora. Sure, Spotify is growing and has been all the buzz recently but I personally have gone back to using Pandora (actually Pandora One which is what the Crestron stream is using). Most of my customers are older people who don't understand Pandora, much less Spotify or Rhapsody or Last.FM or Slacker or.....you get the point. To each his own but I like this card a lot and see it as a very useful piece of gear. Sure, the Squeezebox solution can work but look at the added layer of complexity in the system design. You saved some money over the cost of the AudioNET card but you are now dependent on that server running perfectly or you lose your streams. It can be done but what happens if Squeeze decides that they want to change up firmware or protocol? How quickly can you guarantee a fix for your client? Most importantly, for your company anyway, how much margin are you making on the Squeeze solution? Just my humble $.02