Twonky Forum

In these days, where WMP11 is bundled with most machines, and there are UPnP Mediaservers aplenty, TwonkyMedia needs, I feel, to offer something unique to put it above the crowd, especially since it's not free software like many of it's competitors are.

I think Scrobber support (AKA Last.FM) could indeed be that killer feature. Imagine that it does not matter how or where you play your music, as long as it's served up by TwonkyMedia, it's recoded in your listening history. The history is submitted to your Last.FM profile, which kees stats on what you have been listening to, makes suggestions (good ones I might add) to other bands you might like, lets you know when bands you like are playing in your area, and loads of other great stuff.

http://www.last.fm/tour/

Think social networking for those that love music..

The Last.FM client SDK is available for anyone to develop applications to talk to the Last.FM servers, and the SDK seems platform independant, which is good for Twonky.

So come on Twonky, how about it??? Whilst many software clients already have this feature, no hardware clients do, so adding it to the server makes perfect sense, so it does not matter if I listen to music on my PS3, my Noxon, the PC MediaBrowser, my mobile using the Mobile Mediabrowser, or even using the UPnP connection in WMP11, it still gets recorded by the server.

Anyone else agree, this would be a killer feature?

Would love to see that feature! At this point, would love to see ANY new feature though [/i]

mgillespie, thanks for the heads up on the last.fm service; it's a great idea.

But I see now that the fact that it doesn't have a record of what I play on my home stereo (namely, using TwonkyMedia) is the big missing link.

Having this as a plug in for TwonkyMedia would be fantastic (assuming it could be built to work on my NAS)...

Exactly. My home setup is such, that all my media is served by TwonkyMedia, be it on the PC, on my PS3, or on either of my Noxons around the home.

Having the server record all this and keep my last.fm profile upto date would be an awesome feature.

support for last.fm would be awesome and would surely be the deciding factor in purchasing a nas with tv pre-installed.

thanks

Looking at the responses to this question and the poll, it seems like Twonky has a decision to make as it tries to become the killer application in its category.

Is it going to tack features on in order to appeal to a wired audience that it already has, or is it going to broaden that audience and bring UPnP to the masses?

The users on this forum are technologically sophisticated. Users of Twonky are technologically sophisticated. We're smart and we want more. I would love to see a setting for Internet radio on the same page as Music, Video, and Pictures. It would be cool, and I'd use it.

As of now, though, media servers are a niche product. In my home town, there is no store that I can walk into to buy one. That's cutting the market considerably. Maybe it's a chicken and egg argument, but this technology has not been accepted by Joe and Mary Jane Bestbuyshopper.

Think about how many times after a new version is released, someone writes in to this forum to say, "I'm not able to get X to work on my Y." Will Joe and Mary Jane put up with that? Let's give Christian the time to fix the problems that exist within the program to make it truly universal before we start a whole new chapter of them.

I occasionally look at other applications that work like Twonky and always return. They are comparatively ugly or appear under-featured. I wonder if people have a similar reaction when they see Twonky for the first time, ditch it, and move on to another server.

I think to make this program a category-killer, the emphasis should be on KISS: keeping it simple, stupid. Make it so easy to use that even a Vista Home user could figure it out. Test the heck out of features so that they are ready to go when they are released. (This doesn't mean to make the program simple or featureless. It should give the appearance of being simple while maintaining the many customization options that it has.)

Yup, the best feature to make this application best-in-class and to provide what no other program does would be to give it a well-written Help file.

Until that happens, there are only going to be people like us using this program.

Flame away.

Shockmaindave wrote:Make it so easy to use that even a Vista Home user could figure it out.

And there lies the problem. Vista has UPnP media sharing, which is basic, but easy to setup. TwonkyMedia needs to add more desirable features to encourage people to move from the basic WMP11 sharing, to more configurable, better featured servers like TwonkyMedia.

That's my angle on it, flame away

Mgillespie,

You and the other moderators run a very classy forum.
No flames from here--I agree totally with what you say.

Reading it made me wonder why I care about users who haven't bought the product yet, and all I can come up with was the number of hours I've had to spend on my own troubleshooting and fumbling around.

For myself, I'd like to see better internet radio support and wider support for EXIF tags than the Photoshop Album database.

To combine my previous post with what you pointed out, I think it should be a goal of Twonky to make a superior product simple to use.

Thanks for your thoughtful, not flaming response.

I love stats almost as much as I love tea and music, and feel that the Twonky having the ability to audioscrobble would be the Patrick Bateman of features.

I found a perl based last.fm plugin for SlimServer. It's GPL, and I wonder if it can be modded to work with TwonkyMedia, as a open-source plugin (like how FLAC works).

http://www.jamescraig.co.uk/SlimServer/lastfm.html

Unfortunatly, there seems to be some work needed in the closed source Twonky end to get it to work

I discovered Last.fm a few years ago but never really used it ... since I discovered the ability to scrobble tracks that I've played on my iPod a few months ago I now love this ... to the point that I now avoid streaming music to my Netgear MP101 and PS3 and use iPod docks instead so that I can keep track on what I'm listening to ...

... there's nothing quite like having friends round for drinks and deciding to have a early morning live retro mix tape session and then having to review Last.fm the next day to remember what stuff you played !!!

For me, Twonky is just a video streaming app to the PS3 until Last.fm scrobbling is added to the feature set.

I'd hate to find out another, equally usefull, media server app comes along and tops what Twonky can offer ...

Come on guys, its not as if the Last.fm team aren’t making it easy ... its all open source !

Mark M

http://www.last.fm/user/mjm2705/

It looks like you could probably scrape the log files.

It'd be nice if we could have some sort of API

Hi,

to me this is something only few people will use, so even if it could be an interesting application the market target will be quite small.
In my humble opinion a feature almost everyone would like is DVD ISO or Folder support: having all movies ripped on HD accesible by everyone everywhere will be a nice feature!

mspinolo wrote:Hi,
in my humble opinion a feature almost everyone would like is DVD ISO or Folder support: having all movies ripped on HD accesible by everyone everywhere will be a nice feature!

And also a very dangerous option. Any software that decrypts DVDs is on VERY dodgy ground. For starters, that software would be open to lawsuits (like DVD Decrypter), and you would not be able to sell in certainly the US (DMCA) and Europe.

Anyway, back to Last.FM support....

mgillespie wrote:

mspinolo wrote:Hi,
in my humble opinion a feature almost everyone would like is DVD ISO or Folder support: having all movies ripped on HD accesible by everyone everywhere will be a nice feature!

And also a very dangerous option. Any software that decrypts DVDs is on VERY dodgy ground. For starters, that software would be open to lawsuits (like DVD Decrypter), and you would not be able to sell in certainly the US (DMCA) and Europe.

Anyway, back to Last.FM support....

Yes back to last.fm support!!!!

Why would the ability of playing dvd iso's cause problems? Twonky doesnt have to decrypt them, just play them.

oranges wrote:
Why would the ability of playing dvd iso's cause problems? Twonky doesnt have to decrypt them, just play them.

Because, lets be honest, nobody wants to view unencrpyted DVD's, they want to view ACSS encrypted DVDs....

mgillespie wrote: Because, lets be honest, nobody wants to view unencrpyted DVD's, they want to view ACSS encrypted DVDs....

Sorry, but I do not agree. Consider that all commercial SW DVD Player let you play ripped DVD (in ISO or "Vob") format. If this feature has been added on all commercial DVD players probably it is something requested by the market

mspinolo wrote:

mgillespie wrote: Because, lets be honest, nobody wants to view unencrpyted DVD's, they want to view ACSS encrypted DVDs....

Sorry, but I do not agree. Consider that all commercial SW DVD Player let you play ripped DVD (in ISO or "Vob") format. If this feature has been added on all commercial DVD players probably it is something requested by the market

So if you have to go through the hassle of ripping/decrpying and converting to a ISO, why not just rip/decrpyt to one big VOB file... You have to then ask, why bother with ISO at all, as twonky will stream the MPEG2 VOB just fine...

Back again to last.fm support. I've seen it discussed elsewhere here, and dismissed as it should be supported by the client.
Well, that would be nice, but I think we can rule out support by most clients such as Roku Soundbridge.

In multi-user environments it could be hard to handle different last.fm logins, but I'm sure in most cases there's only one user anyway so that shouldnt be a real issue.

Dang it, one of the competitors products is very close to having last.fm support

what upnp server has last.fm support, or plug in please? The last post said a competitor was close to having that.

I was hoping twonky would have some solution by now, but as we know..

unless theres a way to add such a 'feature' to the linksys NSLU2 some other way...


thx!

Well, I can only agree with all the above.
Last.FM and DVD-ISO support is really what I miss in this product.
That would make it so perfect.

What competitor is almost there, I'm getting curious too!

/rotsa

hi.

just found this:
http://www.lastfm.pl/forum/21716/_/475464

which is what we have been looking for. download here:

http://www.insanityworks.co.uk/twonkysc ... /index.htm

i will try it tonight.

j.