Just got the 3TB MyCloud device, mainly wanting to backup an old laptop – over 80GBs of music on it – and access the files on another laptop without tranferring everything over. I spent a few weeks correcting the ID3 tags on every file in my library before I transferred everything onto the device. But now, when I drag a folder into Winamp or WMP, the files play out of order – and funny enough, seemingly in no discernable order. They don’t play in alphabetical, or by track order. It looks like both players just shuffle the tracks up (no, the players aren’t on shuffle). And being the nerd that I am, when I listen to Abbey Road or The Wall, I’d love to hear them in the proper order.
Anyone else having this problem? I’m not terribly experienced with cloud storage devices – is this a side effect of playing media from the cloud, that I lose the order of my ID3 tags?
Windows media player should be able to play your playlists or albums in the same order as if the files were local. At least this is the way it behaves on my computer. I am not sure about WinAmp as I don’t use this app.
In WMP, my music library feels and act as a local one through the DLNA media server that is running on the NAS.
You could go some other way by mapping the share to a local drive and putting that drive in the Music Library on Win 7 and 8. It takes a workaround to insert a mapped drive in a library, but it can be done. Then WMP would discover the content as it would with local files. If the DLNA server is still user, you would access the music either through the local WMP library pointing at the mapped drive, or through the DLNA server.
Yeah, I tried using Windows Media Player, and found the same result. “Polyethalene Pam” doesn’t come first in Abbey Road! It’s very confusing. Thinking of just linking the MyCloud to iTunes, since iTunes automatically sorts by ID3 tags, unless you have any other suggestions.
I keep checking (I’m up to quadruple and quintuple checking now) my ID3 tags, but all are in place.
Ah ha. So it looks like I need to set up the DLNA server. I guess it wasn’t a default option? I can do the same setup with iTunes, but I was looking for a way to get out of using iTunes anyway. I’ll check back in about this – you’ve been very helpful so far!
So, I got the iTunes link to work fine last night at home (where my NAS is located, obviously), but not I’m at work and iTunes isn’t connected to it anymore. That’s what I was hoping for – to be able to access my music from anywhere with an internet connection, and be able to play them in album-correct order. Is that not possible? Or is there still a step I’m missing?
You could use Wd2go.com to map your remote shares to a drive when you are remote and find access as if you were home. Note that I didn’t try this yet. I expect that it will work OK for music, although the startup time of iTunes might be quite a bit…
It looks like it maps itself when I connect to WD2Go, but the drive changes each time I connect remotely. Yesterday it was the (P:) drive, today it’s the (N:) drive. Is there a way to permanently map the NAS to a local drive and connect that drive to iTunes?
When you map on the local network, Windows does a pretty good job at keepin the same drive letter. When the mapping is done through Wd2go it does look a bit more random. When iTunes open, it will ask you where to find the library and browsing to the top of the mapped drive to find it is a minor annoyance.
Is it working all rigth though, to use the wd2go.com mapped drives? This is using a different protocol (WebDav instead of SMB on the local network), so I am wondering about the behavior with iTunes.
Another way to do this is use a media player that can access http or ftp locations and stream content. The Wd2go.com will give you the http address of your share. Setting up the FTP servier for remote access is a bit more complicated, but manageable.
Ha, well I just finally heard back from WD support, and they said that you can’t access the NAS drive through iTunes when remotely connected. So I guess that answers that.
So now back to the question – I wonder why the albums play out of order when I play through WD2Go?
I will try the iTunes remote later, after I have patched the SSL thing. For the time being, I have disabled remote access so I cannot investigate this topic a bit more.
