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.