MPW: YES! Playlists can play from it

WD External Drives My Passport Wireless
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If you like to use music Playlists you will like this info.

The My Cloud App has no feature to play from Playlists.  This is a major shortcoming for the MPW and other WD devices that rely on My Cloud.  Seagate devices can play from playlists using their mobile app called Seagate Media.  Even I have finally figured out how to get playlists ON my MPW to play to my mobile devices, so why haven’t the smart people at WD figured it out and added this feature.  Maybe this info will inspire them.

Anyway, so how can one play from playlists on a MPW?  First of all, if the My Cloud app is running on your iOS or Android phone or tablet, turn it off – it is useless for this task.  What you DO need is an app that CAN play from playlists.  The app I use on my Kindle (an Android device) is called Avia.  I wrote a thread about Avia a week or so ago here.

For my iOS phone and Pad, I use MediaPlay – people who are familiar with the now defunct Twonky Beam app will recognize MediaPlay, since it is just a custom version of Twonky Beam made for the Belkin Company.  Both of these apps are free from their app stores.

OK, you have the right apps now, and since this discussion is about music playlists, you also NEED MUSIC that is properly structured for playlists.  Easy for me to do, since I have used iTunes to catalog my music since the early iPod days, so the music on my MPW is a direct copy of my iTunes Media folder.  If you have this, then you wiil need PLAYLISTS, and my playlists naturally come from iTunes.  I use the iTunes DJ to create 100-track random playlists from my collection of music albums/tracks.

Once you have the playlists created, they need to be edited so they find music on the MPW and not as they are made to find music on my computer.  Fortunately, there is Microsoft Word that can do this in a split second using Find and Replace. The path to the tracks must be edited by this method, so as an example, here is the path to MY music tracks on the MPW (yours would be different)   *\Public\MY MEDIA_MPW\Music\iTunes Media*   This string replaces the string in front of all the album/track names.  Now, when the app looks at the m3u playlist it can play through it and locate every track.

To keep things neat on the drive, I put all my Playlists in a folder called Playlists, and it is kept in my Music folder.  The app can find the playlist wherever it is on the drive, but I want them all in one place for my convenience.

OK,that’s the basics of all this.  Any questions or comments, let me know.

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Thank you very much for this info. This is something several board members have been trying to find out and it’s great to know there’s a definitive procedure.

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Happy to share this Trancer, as I , too, was one of those wanting to know this.  Listening to one of the playlists from MPW on my Kindle and using Avia app right now!  This procedure should work for about any drive with organized music on it; not just the MPW.  Each drive would need playlists specific to the path to music on that drive. 

By the way, I forgot to mention in my post above that my MPW is connected to my network, although that should not matter if using MPW in Direct Connect condition.

So Trancer, do all of us a favor and share this info internally with the folks at WD in charge of My Cloud app so they can add ability to use playlists for ALL their products.  This is not rocket science; especially if I could figure it out!

Here is another idea:  Since WD has a working relationship with Twonky, how about WD including the functionality of Twonky Beam into My Cloud app – playlist capability and all.

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I have passed along this information to WD Support. 

Regards,

Trancer.

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This is helpful but I am not sure how you put the extension in front of the playlist. If the playlist is created on my mac desktop how do you get it on to an iPad and access it to edit the path

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Mark, thanks for your interest in this procedure. I posted this over two years ago, and you are the first user to comment. Shows us how much interest there has been in this post! Since I only did this on one day and made only five MPW custom playlists just to figure out if, and how, it could be done, I have not thought about it since. I do still make auto-generated playlists from iTunes program; just not for the MPW. A lot has changed since I wrote this, and I have easier ways I use my playlists, because some devices (unlike the MPW) do not need the playlists edited; they can play from them even if the path is wrong – they can just look for the track names and can play them.

Looking back at my instructions, I can see that it takes a good understanding of it all to make it work, and the skills to do so are not in everyone’s skill set. For example, the extension is not what is edited (it remains as m3u) it is the path to the files that must be edited, and the playlist is saved again as a text file with the changes intact. I only use Windows PCs, not Macs, and “paths” are a familiar concept to many Windows users who like to customize their system.
In other words, this procedure is not easy for the majority of people to do.

The edited playlists are not stored on the iPad, they are played on iPad using an iPad app directly from the playlists stored on the MPW as I earlier explained. I have not found too many iOS apps that can even play them like MediaPlay does – it takes an app that accesses files via DLNA/UPnP, and this is not something most iOS apps are set up to do. There is the one app called Belkin MediaPlay that can do this, and why I chose to use this app for my procedure.

I just now played one of these playlists directly from my MPW on my iPad to see if I still could do it, and I could. At the end of this post I will place a screen shot of the iPad screen playing a playlist stored on the MPW.

Bottom line is that one needs to be a bit of a geek to accomplish all this, and I cannot turn a non-geek into a geek within this message to help them accomplish the task. This is all the extra info I will go into here to explain the procedure; geeks will understand the concept as described. One is either a geek or not!

I do suggest you install the MediaPlay app and figure out how to set it up and use it. Very nice, and free, app.

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Mike,

Thank you for taking the time to send such a detailed reply. I am surprised there was so little interest as for me the attraction of the MPW was to stream to my ipad.

I am as you have guessed not quite in geek category so I am struggling and it may be a hopeless case. So far I have an exact replica of my itnunes library on the MPW and have also created a playlist folder as well. I have installed Belkin Media on the ipad and I have imported a playlist from itunes which is a text file to the MPW and replaced what I assume is the path in the text file which was "HD:Users:markhilton:Music:iTunes:iTunes Media:Music” which appears on the text file before every track with a new one directed to the MPW. It is not working but I may have got the path wrong. Am I approaching this along the right lines or have I got the wrong end of the stick. A Seagate drive now looks a much better alternative!

Mark

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Mark,

You are on the right method, keep trying to get your path correct. I have major home construction going on this week, so am real busy. I will try to get back to you again as time permits to help, since I see you are serious to get this working. BTW, my time zone is Pacific (US west coast). What is yours?