SoundBridge M2000 and SlimServer

I've had my eye on the SoundBridge for many moons as an upgrade to my
Audiotron. Specifically, I've wanted to move my music collection over to
FLAC and the SoundBridge acting as a frontend for SlimServer promised to be
the best solution on the market. The shift from SlimServer to iTunes as a
preferred backend has confused me, and I'm trying to figure out if it still
makes sense to buy a SoundBridge.

Reading the SoundBridge manual online makes it very clear that the majority
of Roku's SoundBridge effort is being directed towards their custom UI and
iTunes integration. What does this mean about the quality of experience with
SlimServer as a backend? Photos of the M2000's 3-line display look
fantastic,
but I can't figure out what it will look like fronting for SlimServer. Will
it display three lines of text? Will the fonts be dramatically different?
Will there really be no support or documentation available for SlimServer
users? Seems like there is a disconnect between the website claims of Og and
FLAC support and the manual which basically says, "Use it at your own risk."

For what it's worth, I can't help feeling a bit let down by this embracement
of iTunes. iTunes may be an interesting app to run on a desktop machine, but
many of us early adopters have headless media servers running some variant
of Windows and a dependency on a GUI-driven app like iTunes just doesn't fit
into our worlds. The Audiotron's use of SMB and SlimServer's capability of
running as a server are both reasonable solutions. I'm hoping that you guys
see this and are planning to spend the resources to maintain your SlimServer
support and make it work as well as possible given the limitations of the
SlimServer architecture.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks...

Greg.


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Greg Friedman
[email protected]