Attention iTunes Users!

[SuzieQ]

Thanks jturner22; the downgrade to iTunes 6.05 worked perfectly!

[punterjoe]

I'm a bit of a luddite. (I like to view it as knowing the difference between change & progress) If I don't see a compellng reason to upgrade, I'll stick with what works as long as possible. Since I'm not craving downloadable disneyana, I'm hoping to stick with V6.
Please don't break the old when implementing the new. I've tried a bunch of SB servers, but like iTunes best. Please... don't force users to migrate to V7!

[tbuick6]

But there is a compelling reason to upgrade to 7.0. This update finally eliminates the annoying mini-gaps between songs. These gaps previously made live albums and records with songs that transition into each other virtually un-listenable on the ipod. Finally, a true and usable update, although many will say this should have never been a problem in the first place. Many other mp3 players have for some time solved the mini-gap issue. It took Apple quite some time to wake up!

[laspero]

go to the SoundBridge home page http://www.rokulabs.com/products/soundbridge/index.php
It says works with iTunes. It says so right on the box as well. That's why I bought this product as I am sure many of you did as well. As far as I am concerned, Roku is in violation of their commitment to us and should be making every effort possible to fix the problem. Otherwise we can be calling customer service and asking for RMA number to return them. I am sure Roku realizes this and is working as hard as they can.

Roku... you owe your loyal customers a firm response

thanks,

Larry

[ian]

go to the SoundBridge home page http://www.rokulabs.com/products/soundbridge/index.php
It says works with iTunes.

While I TOTALLY agree that the SB is an officially licensed and authorized product, which we have every expectation of working, I think blaming Roku is a little unfair, when they're the real victims here. We're a bit inconvenienced that our toys have stopped working, but their livelyhood is being messed with by a so-called business PARTNER that they've payed licensed fees to specifically so this sort of screw up doesn't happen.

As for why running multiple servers isn't so great - I've got 5 computers round the house, four of them running iTunes, the other mt-daapd. They all need to interoperate, and running multiple servers on all of them is way more time than I can waste. iTunes works out of the box (or did) and thats how it should be.

I'm sure the Roku boys will be in early monday morning to get working on this...

Ian

[Matsh]

firefly & slimserver are the alternatives I have experience with and my rationale is firefly for my stored music - it has the same interface and menus as itunes on the soundbridge and the added advantage of playing other file formats (ogg, flac etc.)

slimserver is on my sytem for the terrestrial bbc staions (1,2,3,4 etc) which until real player support for the sb is added is the best option to stream them. Granted it was *not* easy to set up (extremely convoluted manual process - not slimserver itself but adding alienbbc inorder to stream the bbc stations) and is still a little glitchy but essentially it does the job & keeps me happy.

There are a multitude of features on slimserver that may attract users over the relative simplicity of firefly, and that of course is what choice is all about. However, I personally find slimserver a little clunky and slow which is why I only use it for the bbc.

I had a Squeezebox but one of the reasosn I swapped for a Soudnbridge was for that painfully slow Slimserver.
I was'n to impressed but the sound either and in the forums people there seem to watch oscillated curves instead of really listen to the music.
There is no right or wrong. What is good in my ears is what I'm going for instead of buying new gadgets (DACs, cables etc).
Actually I went back to analog cable because the digital cable gave to clinical thin sound.
Still, Firefly didn't recognise my iTunes playlists and I've no idea how to organize the music wich iTunes do pretty well.
And there is the iPod problem as well.

BBC radiostations seems to be out of reach for us outside the UK wich I regret very much.

br

Mats

[barryt]

I still can't understand user's reluctance to use Firefly. I didn't have to open a port manually and it works exactly as my direct iTunes did. Why go back to iTunes 6

[SuzieQ]

I still can't understand user's reluctance to use Firefly. I didn't have to open a port manually and it works exactly as my direct iTunes did. Why go back to iTunes 6

I have two libraries; one for WMA lossless (Firefly) and the other for MP3s (iTunes). Once there is a way to have two distinct libraries in Firefly then I will switch over completely. Or is there a way to have two distinct libraries in Firefly?

[barryt]

I still can't understand user's reluctance to use Firefly. I didn't have to open a port manually and it works exactly as my direct iTunes did. Why go back to iTunes 6

I have two libraries; one for WMA lossless (Firefly) and the other for MP3s (iTunes). Once there is a way to have two distinct libraries in Firefly then I will switch over completely. Or is there a way to have two distinct libraries in Firefly?

You can choose the library you want, to exclude the other, I'm not sure about running two.

[grommet]

Off topic, but you can run two instances of Firefly on the same host. There is no UI to do it for you, but it's fairly easy. Either covered in the Roku Firefly forum or Ron's Firefly forum. (I personally can't 100% switch over from WMC 2.0 or WMP 11 UPnP AV just yet for non-DRM content, since I depend on Album Artist... and multiple artists per track... for "serious browsing." Hopefully, Firefly will have a solution for that soon.)

[mikeholland2000]

Hi - great info here. I found out about the Firefly fix for iTunes 7.

Installed 7.0 without checking, but got the Firefly downloaded and and was up and running quickly. However, I've found that when my machine goes to "sleep" after it has been on for a while with no activity - the connection between the Firefly server and my Soundbridge is lost. The only way I can reconnect it is to bring the iMac out of its sleep, stop and start the firefly server. However, this only works for about one song, as my machine goes back to sleep. This never happened with iTunes. Any ideas. I haven't seen this issue mentioned, so I'm hoping its and easy solution. Thanks.

[Glidestar]

Sorry guys but this is a tad off topic. Most, if not all the firefly qustions are covered in the firefly section of the forum.

As has been voiced by several others, we would just like the Roku people to give an educated estimate of the time required to produce a software fix to enable continued use of Itunes. That's all...

By the way, if that estimate overruns I'm sure nobody is going to jump up and down and create about it if, to some extent, we're kept informed of progress.

Now, please, a week, a month or several months?

[mraneri]

I still can't understand user's reluctance to use Firefly.

I can absolutely understand people's relutance to use it. It's something new for them... I was reluctant as well. Until I bit the bullet and tried it... IT WAS A PIECE OF CAKE!!!! There is NO server for the Soundbridge that works like Firefly.. Everyone REALLY owes it to themselves to try it..

What's almost funny are all the people uninstalling Itunes 7 to reinstall ITunes 6. If you don't like firefly, you can uninstall it, and it will likely have left less of a trace of itself on your system than Itunes 7 does when you uninstall IT, and will almost certainly cause you less problems...

Though I suspect, once you install it, and see how well it works, you will not want to uninstall it.

[mikepa]

While I could go and read up on what firefly does, perhaps it would be educational for everyone on this thread and more concise if I ask the following question in this thread:

If I install firefly as my server does it use the itunes rating information and playlists?

[kindall]

I half expect that Apple is planning to fix the bug in the next iTunes update and that's why Roku can't commit to a specific timeframe.