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Music media library

wylton

wylton

Naim and Mana member
Currently, I have all of my digital music stored on a Qnap TS 212 server. I have organised the music into separate folders for each album; artists name - album title.

I'm using two Squeezebox Duet receivers, one upstairs and one down, using the Squeezepad app on the IPad to control it.

This works well enough, though it's not as fast loading stuff as I would like it to be. I guess this is due to the over complicated file structure?

I was just looking for guidance as to the best way to set up a music library without using iTunes.
 
Not using Itunes is a very good start !

If QNAP is anything like my Asset server, it will create a big index of albums/tracks/etc, so however complex the physical storage, it won't affect the response times.
 
Oh, so it's most likely a Squeezebox related issue then?

The other thing is that I save all zip files to another drive and unzip them to the server; the zip files act as another back up, should one of the drives fail, but synchronising the Server and the zip back up folder can be a bit of a pain if I leave it too long.

A lot of it is stuff that I bought from Bandcamp or Beatport.

The major issue is the lack of time that I have to attend to these things.
 
Your file structure seems the wrong way round to me, surely it should be artist/group>album

Perhaps run something like BLISS over it to get it organised nicely. Not that this should effect squeeze or an UPNP server which will actually be looking at the metadata in each file.
 
garyi said:
...surely it should be artist/group>album
Click to expand...

I think you have misread my post; that is the way I name the folders, but yes, I was wondering about the Metadata. If I didn't bother to use a file structure, would the individual tracks still be held together by the Metadata?
 
If you set up your metadata sensibly, and use a decent music player like JRiver Media Center, it won't really matter how you have organised your folders, you will be able to have whichever and as many views as you want. Artist > Album or Composer > Work > Artist, or Bass Player > Decade ....whatever takes your fancy. Logitech Media server isn't bad, though it is pretty long in the tooth and it's not very easy to add your own views. JRiver is more flexible ime. If you haven't got your metadata sorted, JRiver will extract it from your folder names. The individual tracks in an album will always be held together, because they have the same "Album" tag. You can decide whether you want multi-disc albums to appear as one album, or one for each disc. Compilations usually take a bit of fiddling with to get to behave sensibly, especially if you didn't set the "Compilation" tag, but these long winter nights are ideal for sorting out your tags. JRiver makes short work of it.
 
OK, thanks.

So can I use JRiver Media Center instead of Logitech Media server through the Squeezebox Duets? Would I load it onto the QNAP?

Please excuse the ramblings of a novice...
 
Wylton - you should be able to use JRMC to send stuff to your Duets because I think they should appear as DLNA renderers. There's also a piece of software called whitebear that makes a good interface between the two. But JRMC is worth using just as a tag editor to get your metadata sorted - it is free for a month. You need to run it on a PC or Mac though.
 
I don't know about streaming but Jriver is one of the slowest audio software I've tried, so their DLNA server can't be any good,
If you have a ton of flac files, then whatever DLNA/UPnP server you use, it will be slow, you can try some fancy Nas with corei3 like the last Asustors but it wont be fast like a good old desktop pc runing Foobar out to a Dac,
 
Once the files have been scanned by LMS it doesn't care about the file structure. I have multiple squeezeboxes accessing a small Celeron powered LMS. It's fast and efficient. I would suggest that your QNAP isn't powerful enough to run LMS and/or you have an old version. LMS generally runs better with a small PC rather than a NAS (cheaper too!).
 
wylton said:
This works well enough, though it's not as fast loading stuff as I would like it to be. I guess this is due to the over complicated file structure?
Click to expand...

I hope you are not browsing the music as file folders, but using the LMS metadata-based browsing/search. Browsing as folders would be slow - that is not how it is intended to be used.
 
Julf said:
Browsing as folders would be slow - that is not how it is intended to be used.
Click to expand...

Yes, I think that is the problem.

The trouble is that there are quite a few folders on various drives that contain music, but I only want the media server to look on the sever.

When I browse for music on the iPad, it finds all kinds of stuff that isn't on the server, so it must be that I erroneously pointed it in the wrong direction when doing a rescan at some point.

Should I clear My Music from the LMS and rescan only on the intended drive?

I'm also wondering whether I would be better off running LMS from the main PC rather than the server.
 
wylton said:
Should I clear My Music from the LMS and rescan only on the intended drive?
Click to expand...

Probably a good idea.

I'm also wondering whether I would be better off running LMS from the main PC rather than the server.
Click to expand...

If you keep the server on 24/7, I would definitely keep LMS on the server.
 
Thanks.

I found the problem!

A while back there was a security issue that prevented a back up going where it was meant to go, so it backed up to the server! So when I do a scan, it is finding everything on the back up file too!

Now I have to delete the back up from the server and do a clean back up else where.

My back up strategy is a mess I must admit.
 
Has anyone any tips of ridding myself of iTunes. I used it to rip most of my cds and the files are on my nas these days but I'd love an alternative.
 
Bangaio: For ripping, dbPoweramp would be my choice, there is also XLD and others. For playback, it depends if you stream over a network or play locally into a DAC.
 
I had LMS runting on a Netgear NAS.

Having got to about 15000 tracks it was painfully slow in use. Just not powerful enough.

Switched to LMS running on an old PC & a 1TB ssd, and it's great. LMS may be a bit long in the tooth but it's very flexible once you install a few community written add-ons.

Means my SB Touch, SB 3's, & Transporter all still serve music almost instantly on request.

Back-up I agree is still a bit of a pain & i've never invested any time on a commercial synchronisation program ...which I really should. I have backups but maintaining them is onerous, so if anyone can recommend anything suitable it would be helpful.
 
wylton said:
Currently, I have all of my digital music stored on a Qnap TS 212 server. I have organised the music into separate folders for each album; artists name - album title.

I'm using two Squeezebox Duet receivers, one upstairs and one down, using the Squeezepad app on the IPad to control it.

This works well enough, though it's not as fast loading stuff as I would like it to be. I guess this is due to the over complicated file structure?

I was just looking for guidance as to the best way to set up a music library without using iTunes.
Click to expand...

The speed, or the lack of it, has nothing to do with iTunes. Nor is your folder structure an issue. For a streamer system tags (metadata inside the music files) are important.
The main reason for your slow system is your NAS. It has an ARM based CPU and it is not the fastest option to run LMS on. So if you need more speed you can either get an x86 based NAS or run LMS on an external and faster server. A faster server could even be an ARM based machine like an RPI 3. I've build a system for a friend based on an RPI 3 and that runs very well too.

For your info, my music is managed by iTunes and LMS runs on my ReadyNAS NVX. Works great.
 
I stream from a synology diskstation to a sonos connect and chromecast at the moment. I'm going to check out dbPowerAmp and XLD and see where I get to - many thanks.
 
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