Benefits of Using a CUBE Physical Player

There is always playback equipment involved.

When you’re playing music at your store, there is always equipment responsible for doing the playback, outputting the audio signal into your amplifier and speakers. Either you’re using a physical player device, like CUBE, or you’re running software on a phone, tablet or computer. In any case, there is always some piece of equipment involved.

Old-school streaming, vs the CUBE device’s next-generation streaming

When your music is 100% reliant on traditional streaming over your internet connection, the music goes down if the internet goes down or is slow.

Internet outages happen all the time, in fact there are probably several right now. Sometimes such outages could last hours, as happened to several streaming services here.

Traditional streaming also uses as much as 100 times the bandwidth of CUBE’s unique next-generation streaming. So, unlike traditional streaming, CUBE devices won’t slow your network down or make other business functions (like processing of transactions) take longer!

CUBE’s next-generation streaming intelligently manages data within each CUBE device’s own storage, radically reducing the amount of bandwidth and the need for a 100% reliable internet connection.

Traditional streaming systems that claim to offer a local backup, are often stretching the truth!

Some streaming services claim that they store songs locally on your device to play if the internet goes down. This is often stretching the truth quite thinly! Because often these are not the same songs that people actually want to hear. And especially when the service is playing the music from inside a web browser, the amount of space it can use to store songs locally, is in fact very small: typically only enough for 5 to 10 songs.

So in an outage, either you’re going to be hearing songs you don’t want, or the same few songs over and over again, or nothing. This is just different lipstick on the same old traditional streaming.

Those online-only mobile apps that actually do store songs locally, have a big downside.

Say that you’re using an online service that really does store songs locally on your device. This means that you had to install software, like a special app, on your tablet, phone, PC or Mac. Imagine you installed this onto your tablet. A good quality music program can easily use up 16GB of space. Or more than double, if you want to be able to change between programming locally. This can use up a significant portion of the storage you have available on your tablet or phone. You may not have space for much else! Perhaps you might think that the program can be set up to use less space, or perhaps you can use an SD card to expand your tablet’s storage. However: the less space it uses, the more you are back to traditional streaming. And the more frequently the software has to change out songs on your tablet, the faster its storage memory will wear out. Yes, flash storage memory wears out, and your tablet will gradually get slower and slower because of this. If you’ve expanded its storage with the kinds of SD cards you can buy from computer stores, the SD card will wear out even faster than the tablet; and you’ll have to keep buying replacement cards.

There is a hidden cost to using your tablet or other device for business music playback.

Now you might think that you’re OK because you’ve installed the playback software on your PC or Mac instead. Did you know that most credit card companies do not like you having other software running on the same computer used for your point of sale system? They especially do not like other software that has to talk to the internet to install things - like downloading songs or installing updates - because those things might all be used to gain access to your computer from the outside; which could then result in the theft and compromise of personal payment data. This has proven to be such a big problem, that you can get into serious trouble with your payment processors if you do not respect this rule. Therefore, you probably have another PC, Mac or tablet that you have to use for playing music. This means another computer that might get broken into from the outside, another computer that has to be maintained, managed and kept up to date with software patches, anti-virus, anti-malware and so forth. In other words, running your business music playback on a PC or Mac means that your IT services cost more.

Not to mention tablet batteries that fail, devices that want to install OS updates in the middle of the day, new Android versions that suddenly change the behaviour of audio playback, or tablets that stop playing when the screen goes to sleep.

Unlike other playback devices, CUBE has been designed with security in mind.

Some music services use their own playback devices, similar to CUBE. However, did you know that many of these systems are not very secure? These days, anything that is connected to the internet, that has not been designed with security in mind, is at risk of being broken into remotely. The biggest outage on the internet in recent memory, was caused by exactly this. You can also see these articles about simple internet webcams being broken into and used to launch attacks:

Article 1

Article 2

This even applies to playback devices based on Android: for example see this article about hacking Android devices by using malicious MP3 and MP4 files! If you have an insecure device on your network that is taken over, not only does this place your customers at risk through the theft of private data from your network; it can also mean substantial bandwidth usage because your internet connection can then be used to attack others. CUBE has been designed with lots of security built in. We worry about security, so that you don’t have to!

CUBE can do everything that any online-only music service can do.

You may find an online-only music service attractive, because you may feel you have a certain level of control over the music that you can play. CUBE can do everything that you can do from any online-only music service: including using your computer, phone or tablet to control or influence what is actually playing. Simply ask us how!