Hello there,
thanks for sharing you experience and i am sorry to hear what you had gone through with the app. Regarding the Static IP, you could try this to see if it helps you out with the music playback locally.
You can also try to do some port forwarding to see if it helps witht he remote playback, here is a link that might help you with this :
http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=8526
This thread might also be helpful for you:
Hope this helps you out a little bit with some of your issues, lets see if other users can share some more help and tips for you.
