Problem playing Mp3s - Help!

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

I just bought a WD Live.  Everything seems to be working except for the fact the WD Live can’t seem to play ANY of my MP3s. I’ve tried changing many settings - no go.  Please help!

I have a Windows 7 PC running as a media server, connecting over wired ethernet.  The WD Live sees my media server, I can browse folders and files, and I can even view pictures - all no problem.  However, on the music side, when I browse through my MP3 collection, the Live sees the folders and files also with no problem, but as soon as I try and play any of them… it goes into the normal play mode screen… and repeatedly skips to the next song, again, again, again until all files in the folder have been hit.  It doesn’t play any music - just keeps skipping to the next song.  At the end, it gives me a message about the WD live only supports certain file types and that I should refer to the manual.

These are all standard MP3s recorded at various bit rates.  What do I need to do?

Thanks.

2

Hmmm.   It MAY be a bitrate or resolution that isn’t supported.   Exactly what are the details of these files?   

Do they work if you SHARE them instead of running through a media server?

I’ve not come across any of mine that won’t play (Yet.)

3

Does your unit play any other audio formats?

As for MP3’s - the only MP3 files my live/plus units could not play are MP3’s created with AlbumWrap.  Do you happen to know if the MP3’s you have were albumwrapped?

Also, take one of these MP3’s and reencode using some audio utility into an MP3 file using, say, Lame encoder, would this lame encoded MP3 file play now on your unit?

4

Thanks for the input.  I did some more testing in the last 24 hours, and this is what I found…

I have 2 directory structures on my PC w/ several thousand MP3s.

I don’t normally use WMP to play them on my PC, I use iTunes.

In order to share them as a media server (PC <-> WDTV), I noticed it integrates with WMP & W7 Libraries.

I added both directories to the Library, gave WDTV read access, then tested as above when I first posted.

After posting above, I noticed that WMP appeared to be doing some Albumn lookup to the internet, so I thought that maybe the reason I couldn’t play any MP3s was the WMP was in the middle of indexing and looking up my files.  So, I gave it overnight to finish doing it’s thing…

Now, here’s where it gets wierd!

So, I can now browse my files through the WDTV OSD and successfully play about 50% of them.  The other 50% show up in the OSD, but when I hit play… they just do what I desribed before… the player screen shows as if it’s going to play the song, but it then just skips through each song in the list w/o playing anything… and then tells me the file types are incompatible when it reaches the end of the directory.

So, if I then get on my PC (the media server), go into WMP and do a “play to WD TV” on those same songs that fail when using the WDTV OSD, they play just fine through the WDTV streamer!!!  Then, if I stop all that, go back into the living room and browse to those files on OSD, then they now play fine too using the OSD.  Very wierd.  I’m thinking the problem lies with how WMP is indexing/organizing the in my Library.

Any suggestion?  Is there better media server SW than WMP?  Or is there some command I can issue to tell WMP to index and make available all of my files in those directory (should happen automatically based on my reading).

5

Does your unit play any other audio formats?

I have several FLACs, but W7 WMP doesn’t seem able to play that format.  That’s another thing on my to do list.  I might just have to skip the whole media server approach and do a windows share… but it is nice to be able to “play to”.

6

Just connect via media shares and tell us that you can play your MP3’s and that the real problem is the way you are trying to play them. That is a different problem.