Summary:

The current system is to store presets on either LMS or mysqueezebox.com, and there is no reliable failover method between them if either is unavailable (which is normal with LMS on a PC that goes to sleep). The impact on the user is unreliable "flaky" presets with lengthy, awkward recovery steps. The Radio docs do not cover this.

This is a request to either store radio presets on a reliable, predictable device e.g. the radio itself, or else to implement a proper failover system between LMS and mysqueezebox.com. 

Background:

I have just bought a Radio for my mother. Unfortunately she is on the point of rejecting it due to the preset buttons' behaviour being very unpredictable compared to presets on a conventional radio. Her simple requirement is for pressing a preset to play a radio station.

Specifically she has found that presets for radio stations are unreliable (sometimes they are lost altogether) or she has to fiddle about with various menu settings in order to get them to work again (or else she has to navigate to the station manually). All of this is severely denting the otherwise useful features that the Radio offers.

She has LMS on a PC which goes to sleep after some time (or else is shut down at night). I've read a few threads and it seems to be a common problem.
One issue seems to be that the presets are apparently stored on both LMS and mysqueezebox.com. The documentation does not mention this.

So I thought I could cover all eventualities by storing the same presets on both services. I did this by storing them while 1) LMS is selected as the music library and 2) while MSB.com is selected. I also made switching to MSB.com a home menu option. Unfortunately it seems that this still does not result in a simple user experience.

Examples:

If the radio was previously connected to LMS and the LMS PC is now asleep or off, then selecting a preset results in a LMS Problem Connecting error. It prompts to switch libraries, but doing this only results in yet another Problem Connecting error. :-(
Recovery involves manually navigating to the option to switch to MSB.com.

If the radio is playing a radio station and it was previously connected to LMS, and now the PC is asleep or off, then merely changing vol level results in another "Problem Connecting" error, with the same tortuous unintuitive navigation to resolve the issue.

I can appreciate that it is really a pain to have to keep switching to MSB.com every time there is an error or even by pre-empting it by selecting MSB.com before using the radio at all.

Considering the way that this is all apparently operating, as a general principle it just strikes me as very odd to store effectively the same information across multiple remote resources whose availability varies, and also to lack any effective failover between them, either automatic or prompted.

One option that makes much more sense to me is to store the presets locally on the radio. Does anyone know what the reasons are for the current system? It seems a shame to spoil the user experience by varying so much from the established preset operation of a "normal radio".

(posted in http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=93876)
Radio Firmware: 7.7.1-r9557