'[FAQ] Twonky DLNA Media Server Setup & Use

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
81

MediaMonkey should change the metadata embedded in the file, if you edit the various metadata fields. You will see this happen, as MediaMonkey will give a green progress bar as it writes the modified file to disk. You should also see the file modification date change. (see ‘aha’ below…)

It may take Twonky a while to pick up metadata changes, depending on the library update setting. If necessary, you can force a library rescan.

It looks like the M&J media players should be DLNA compliant. Therefore, you can use any DLNA-compliant media client to select media to send to it; you are not obliged to use the one they suggest (in theory). MediaMonkey running on a PC is a DLNA-compliant DMC, and can stream audio to a UPnP/DLNA renderer, so you could use MM as your media client:

Tools/Options/Player/Choose Player/UPnP-DLNA Renderer

select the DMR device you want to play to (your M&J player).

MM can access a DLNA Digital Media Server (e.g. Twonky), but that’s not how I use it; I point MM to my MyCloud media drive, and let it index it itself (aha: that may be where you’re going wrong: if you access the Twonky DMS using MM, rather than getting MM to create its own library by scanning the disk, it probably cannot modify the metadata tags stored in the Twonky database).

MM can also provide a DLNA DMS…

Admittedly, you may not want to have to have your PC running to play music, in which case, you might look to a smartphone or small tablet to be the DMC (Digital Media Controller). I use BubbleUPnP running on Android devices, or MusicBee running on a small Windows 8.1 tablet (bought secondhand for £25, intended to run MM, but it doesn’t have enough RAM to run my 65k track MM library).

What metadata appears on the M&J streamer screen is a different matter; that may be determined by the ‘Receiver Type’ Twonky has selected/M&J has informed Twonky. Since the M&J player is new, I don’t expect it to appear in the list of possible Media Receivers that Twonky knows about, so you may have to play with trying other receiver types to see which works best with the M&J.

82

You made my day :grinning: - beside all your other hints this was the one. I reconfigured MM to search only the MyCloud media drive and tataaaaa - Twonky shows the changes in no time.
I´m pretty sure WMP would do the same job when I configure it accordingly, but looks like I will switch to MM.

Still investigating your other hints and learning - thanx a lot for this compendium :clap:

One additional info - to select a track/artist/album for my M&J player I use UNDOC for iPAD which works mostly for my requirements :wink:

83

Check out MM’s abilities to infer tags from filenames (‘Auto-tag from filename’), or to re-name/re-organise file structures based on tags (‘Auto-Organize from tags’). It has a very sophisticated filename parsing system, and filename construction system, using parsing strings.

84

I received an email enquiry yesterday, regarding Twonky and large media libraries.

The user is having problems with the media scanning slowing down dramatically after about 130k files (which takes 3-5 hours to scan, which sounds a lot to me; my rebuild for 65k music tracks takes about 50 minutes). Thereafter, each additional 10k tracks take 12-24 hours, and getting slower.

My suspicion is that the database has got so large that it cannot be held in memory, and the device is therefore having to write to disk, with the resulting file thrashing. It may be worth looking at the size of the database in the twonkymedia folder (IIRC…), to see how big it is.

Has anyone else had any experience of large media libraries (200k+ files)?

85

It could easily be examined experimentally.

FFMPEG is a command line utility, that with some simple linux script-fu, could be used to conjure up a very large “collection” in a matter of minutes, based on some still image files.

Since it is the number of files that is the issue, not their length or content, upper and lower bounds on when the supposed problem starts and when it reaches system saturation can be determined experimentally.

I dont really feel like doing it though.

86

The user that emailed me already has a large collection (230k files) to experiment with; it’s a real problem, not a hypothetical one…

I suppose a synthetic test library could be used to see if it’s a problem unique to the user, or a problem generally applicable to the MyCloud. And, as you say, determine the point at which library size becomes a problem.

I suppose ps could be used to determine the %memory used by the twonky process. I’m sure there are other unix management commands that would be useful to reveal if a large amount of virtual memory is being required, and how much page swapping is being done.

I was hoping others who have large media libraries would chip in with their experience; whether they see similar problems, or not.

If Twonky is having to use virtual memory to hold its media database, I would imagine that accessing the library would also be problematic.

87

Using bubbleupnp on a android phone with twonky 7.2.9-13 and a my cloud gen 2, it will not show the technical info of the song/album like bitrate etc, something to do with the app using the mediaserver data the developer said. Is there a fix for this?

i have the phone set as an ‘asset ds control point’ in the twonky server settings.

88

I use Bubble on a Gen1, and usually set Songpoint DS (?) as the renderer. i have no problem viewing bitrate and file type.

89

889×280 60.1 KB

this works, but not technical info.

Am i doing something wrong?

90

Try changing navigation to ‘advanced’, rather than ‘classic’.

91

no change,

The ‘Hifi Cast’ app, show the technical info.

92

Have you told Bubble to show the technical info? It’s an option, IIRC.

93

Yes tried that, I’m going to try a different router.

94

It seems that i am playing songs that are not part of the DLNA standard, thus no technical info.

95

cpt_paranoia what music file types are you playing? I’m playing flac & alac, which are not part of the dlna standard which is why the metadata isn’t being sent, this is after emailing twonky themselves. Do I have to copy the music across with special software, I’m just dragging and dropping in windows explorer.

96

Yes, I’m now home and able to play. And it does look like FLAC files on a DLNA server don’t have technical info displayed.

In fact, Bubble doesn’t seem to display technical info for FLACs even if they’re on a local disk.

Apologies for not being able to check correctly earlier. I could have sworn it showed technical information for FLACs, but I must be confusing it with MediaMonkey and/or MusicBee.

97

Okay, thanks for clearing that up.

Tried playing off my PC, and yes the info is there.

Seems to possibly be a feature not in twonky 7.

98

The fact that bubble doesn’t show them, even when on a local file server, suggests it’s not just a Twonky/DLNA problem, and maybe just that bubble doesn’t show details for FLACs.

99

when i select my windows 10 pc as a libary source, with flac files there is some info that comes up.

When i emailed the bubbleupnp developer, the app he says will not take the info from the file but off the metadata that the dlna server sends from its database, and there will be no update to support taking the info off the file itself. So according to Twonky themselves as the flac and alac files are not part of the dlna standard, twonky will not send the info.

Hope that makes sense.

100

I’m not disputing that Twonky doesn’t provide the information.

I’m saying that Bubble doesn’t show the bit rate of FLAC files either, even when playing from a file server (so nothing to do with Twonky or DLNA).