Advice on music management and sharing

garethuk · 27 Jul 2009

Hello everyone,

How do you all manage your music these days? In the old days when I only had one computer, I used to use Windows Media Player to sort and rename my files automatically. As it updated it's library, I would be able to use Windows Media Center to play it as the media library was common across both.

Now I have 2 htpcs operated completely through Media Center, 1 standard office-style pc, 1 laptop and a HP MediaSmart Home Server I am a bit lossed as to how to best organise and share the files.

This is how I currently am doing it:

All music files are placed into the Music share on my Windows Home Server
On my main HTPC, I use Windows Media Player to "find" the music - once found, media player re-organises and renames the files to correct names / locations. It also adds it into its own music library
All other computers can access the files through windows explorer, but do not have the files in their own libraries because I don't want them to individually manage the files
I have tried to share the music from my main HTPC but it is painfully slow (I have a very large library)
I also now have an iPhone and it would be good to be able to integrate this into the mix

Does anyone know of a better way of managing and sharing my music? I would still like to be able to access my music inside Windows Media Center as I enjoy this interface.

Thank you to anyone for their help with this.

Gareth

mikinho · 27 Jul 2009

Gareth, you can add the remote files to each library without having it "manage" them. You just turn those options off but add the share. It is a slight pain to configure each library individually but works well after that point. If you'd like I could write a quick tool to ensure all your Library settings are the same.

In terms of your iPhone. I use Orb for that purpose. The client is free but the iPhone app is not; however, it is nice for streaming Live TV\Movies as well. In the past I used Simplify; but I believe it is no longer free either (it was initially).

Btw, what method did you attempt to share your library using WMP that was slow? Just curious as the new feature in WMP12 to stream over the internet is actually quite fast for me. I'm confident that an iPhone app will be released that utilizes this soon. If not I'll look at making it but I have a feeling MS will release it later this year.

garethuk · 28 Jul 2009

Thanks for the advice. I previously used the media sharing feature in mediaplayer.

I found that I could access it in the Media Player window (a bit like other mailboxes in Outlook), but that it was really slow to navigate and search for a specific album.

Am I right in saying that if I want media player to simply add to the library without changing metadata or reorganising files, I select the following items:
Options -> Library Tab

Untick "Retrieve additional information from the internet"
Untick "Rename music files using rip music settings"
Untick "Rearrange music in rip music folder..."
Monitor folders - set this to music share

Many thanks