I’ve had my 2TB My Book Live for a year and a half or so. A couple of weeks ago I upgraded the firmware and enabled the WD DLNA server. I then ran BubbleUPnP on my Nexus 5 to access the audio files on the NAS through DLNA.
Here are a few things I learned that may be helpful to others doing the same thing.
* One navigation option in DLNA is through the folder structure, which is what I wanted since I’ve never really paid attention to the tags on my files and instead have used the folder structure and filenames. However, once you drill down to the folder containing the particular album you want to play, the files are ordered by tags and not by filename. It appears that to sort correctly, none of the files in the folder can have the same track number tag, and all the files in the folder have to have the same album name. If both of those conditions aren’t true, files are sorted alphabetically by the track name tag. This makes sense once I figured it out, but it meant some work with a batch tagger like mp3tag to sort out. Double albums often had album tags like “White Album Disc 2” so I had to make sure to change all those to just “White Album” if I wanted the complete album together in one folder to sort correctly.
* Gapless playback was the bigger problem and the one that ultimately led me to give up. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the files to play gaplessly in my setup. The gap was small, but there. I wasn’t sure if the problem was the DLNA server on the NAS or if the problem was with the player on the phone, so at someone else’s suggestion I set up a DLNA server through Foobar on my Windows 8.1 laptop and ran the same test files. Using Foobar as the DLNA server, I was able to play the same files gaplessly through BubbleUPnP on my phone, which to me narrowed the problem to the My Book Live since that was the only variable that was different. It appears that the WD DLNA server doesn’t do gapless.
The good news is that since my needs are fairly specific–I only want to play audio files in the order specified by the filenames in a folder structure–I discovered that I can play audio files gaplessly through my wireless network from the WD My Book Live to my phone by using the Neutron Music Player app, which connects to the NAS directly through SMB without needing DLNA. And it also means I don’t have to fix all my tags since it plays by default by filename order. Good enough.
I’d be interested to hear if anyone has had a different experience.
