Using MBL with iTunes

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

So my goal is to play iTunes on my Mac Air with the media being stored on the MBL, nearly as seamlessly as when I had my old black Macbook with the media stored on it locally.  I thought it would be as simple as copying the media to the MBL and then going to iTunes preferences- advanced tab- and repoint media location to the public folder on the MBL.  Yes it plays, but it takes ~10 secs after I click play to actually start with the beach ball spinning.  Airplay drops all the time, especially between songs.  It just decides to stop after a few songs sometimes, etc., etc.  Just to locate a file in Finder I usually get a beach ball for a few seconds with each click.  Already did a factory restore and firmware update and recopied everything second time which did help; before that it was even worse.

Unitl now in the MBL web interface under settings- media I just had enable iTunes server selected.  I had been under the impression Twonky doesn’t work with Mac, but today I went to my IP address:9000 and configured Twonky.  Selected ‘Generic Media Receiver’ for the Air.  It sees the MAC address for the Air, rebooted the MBL and rescanned library.  It sees everything, but playback does not seem much better.  But when in iTunes if I select the MBL in the left column it seems to do better, but no artwork, no playlists and only about 10% of the songs show up there.  Can’t I just play the ‘regular’ way…using the main music folder or regular playlists, smart playlists, etc.?  Should I be using Twonky at all?  Should iTunes ‘look’ any different if Twonky is used?  What am I doing wrong?  I really do nat want to use iTunes Match and the Air has very little storage.  I have tried so many other ways before getting the MBL and nothing is working out nicely short of using the old Macbook as a server which I really don’t want to do either.  Just want to play my tunes without aggrevation.

Sorry for the length and I did search for other similar posts.  Maybe someone can point me to another discussion if they know of a helpful one.  Thanks in advance.

My set up:

Mac Air with 8GB of RAM all updates current

Time Capsule being used as the router

2TB MBL connected directly to the Time Capsule- MBL firware updated

3 Airport Expresses with speakers plugged in that I want to use simultaneously

2

I should also add that if I have no AirPlay devices selected and just play music throught the Air itself, it does really good.  But this is not really acceptable to me.

3

Hello, you can try using a static IP for the My Book Live, to see if that helps to give you a more stable connection. See page 66 of the manual for more information. 

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/UM/ENG/4779-705058.pdf#page=70

4

Thank you very much for responding! However the MBL was already set with a static IP. It us also using CAT 6 ethernet. I really thought this device was gonna be the answer for what I am looking to do. And if I am doing something wrong, I don’t understand why it needs to be so difficult. And if it is a more complex config, WD should have better documentation. My gut is telling me that the MBL just performs crappy and I need to use an old PC that has a brain (CPU) as a server. But it would be nice to actually get this thing to work adequately.

5

Hi 4train, please check your private messages.