WD My Cloud 2TB Music Setup with Itunes

[Dansmark]

I don’t have a manual for the info.
Twonky is enabled, but not ITunes.
I already have music in 2 different directories.

1. Country
2. Rock
   Each album is in a different directory (By Artist name).

My Phone & Tablet finds the music, but It’s not arranged by artist, just a list of songs.
I have to scroll down to pick a song to play (each time).

How can I arrange the music so I can play a whole album if I wanted, or all songs by an artist?
Do I need the ITunes enabled for this function?

Thanks,
D

[cat0w]

Use the following link and scroll down to find the User Manual for your version of My Cloud.

WD My Cloud Home: Best Cloud Storage for Photos (2 TB - 8 TB) | Western Digital

What brand of phone and tablet do you have?

[Dansmark]

Samsung’s, Galaxy S3 phone and a 7" tablet.
Use the “Music” player that came with them.
They find the cloud & music, but don’t give list options (like artist, album).

Do you know of a player that can access My Cloud and use the meta-data found there?
I’ve tried a few from the Play-Store, but were nothing like I wanted…

Thanks,
D

[cpt_paranoia]

@Dansmark

I already have music in 2 different directories.

1. Country
2. Rock

I don’t file music by genre, since any decent media manager/player will allow you to browse by the genre metadata tags.

I’d recommend a media storage that reflects your physical collection. I use a very simple four-level hierarchy:

<source>/<album artist>/<album>/<track>

Where <source> is where it came from (my ripped CDs, purchased downloads, free downloads, etc). This is an optional level of hierarchy.

Once you have imported your music into a library, you can browse by whatever metadata fields you like, including the physical file structure (‘By Folder’). That is, assuming your metadata tags are correct and complete…

I’d also recommend that all track filenames are prefixed with a leading-zero track number, which will give you the correct track order in even the most basic of media players (using alphanumeric sort order). e.g.

01 track one.ext
02 track two.ext
...
10 track ten.ext

@Dansmark

Samsung’s, Galaxy S3 phone and a 7" tablet.

Then you don’t want (or need) the iTunes server, assuming the tablet is also Android.

@Dansmark

Do you know of a player that can access My Cloud and use the meta-data found there?

BubbleUPnP handles DLNA metadata very well, including forcing numeric search order for albums.

You might benefit from reading how to setup and optimise the Twonky media server:

'[FAQ] Twonky DLNA Media Server Setup & Use

Some Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Twonky, And Some Answers The MyCloud includes a Twonky DLNA Media Server. Sadly it doesn’t seem very well integrated into the MyCloud, and the two fight for supremacy. I’ve spent a long time trying to understand how it works, and reading the forum, I see many other people also have trouble with it. So I thought that, rather than trying to answer these questions individually, I’d try to write an FAQ covering the things I’ve found, and the problems I or …

[Dansmark]

1. I’ve got my Albums arranged similar to yours.
   source/country/album artist/track
   source/rock/album artist/track
   2 different directories.

2. Never tried BubleUpnP
   I’ll give it a try.

3. I read about the Twonky DLNA setup & use.
   I’m pretty sure it correctly setup.

The Music player I have recognizes my Cloud and let me connect & play music found there.
Meta-Data (MD) is displayed for each song, but is arranged as a list.
No capability of categorizing the MD to play a whole album.
I would think that would be standard with all music players (but the ones I tried don’t).

Thanks,
D

[cpt_paranoia]

@Dansmark

1. I’ve got my Albums arranged similar to yours.
   source/country/album artist/track
   source/rock/album artist/track

No capability of categorizing the MD to play a whole album.

Well, if you select the DLNA ‘By Folder’ view, since your file hierarchy doesn’t include ‘Album’, it won’t be able to present a list of tracks on an album.

DLNA provides a number of ‘views’; ways of sorting media by metadata tag or path. Extra ‘views’ can be added. If your current player doesn’t offer the following views, look to get a better player:

album
all tracks
artist
artist index
artist/album
by folder
composer
genre/album
genre/artist/album
genre/song
personal rating
playlists

You might also enable the ‘advanced navigation view’ using the Twonky UI.

The FAQ thread discusses ways to optimise the Twonky media server to get the most views, and how to add more views.

[Bennor]

Couple of suggestions. iTunes sometimes does a poor job at structuring music folders and tagging media files, especally if one uses iTunes to rip audio CD’s. I’ve resorted to using other programs (Mp3Tag and Media Monkey) at times to fix various metadata tagging issues and file naming issues.

As mentioned above if you don’t use the Album name as a folder name then using the View by Folder option in the DLNA player most likely won’t work. I always tag my files thus:
\<artist name>\<album name>\<track number track name>

For example:
\Sugarland\Enjoy The Ride\01 Settlin'.mp3

It also helps to ensure the media is properly tagged with as much info as possible including using the Album and Artist fields. I found that using leading zeros for the initial file text name (example: 01, 02, 03, etc.) and for the track number solves certain playback problems where tracks play out of album order or pay alphabetically on certain DLNA clients/devices.

If you plan to use iTunes Media Library that you copied from a PC or Mac its important to copy over the entire iTunes Media folder and subfolders otherwise iTunes may not properly. One should also change the media file location for iTunes to point to the new location on the My Cloud NAS.

[Dansmark]

Thanks for the help guys!!

I will access the links you provided and re-structure my music folders (as you both have suggested).
I’ll let you know the outcome when I get everything completed…

Thanks again for the help,
D

[Dansmark]

Update:
I started downloading my music back to my hard-drive so I could use a program (Jaikoz) I found, to search for the meta data for songs I have.
The program works great, if you buy the full version…
After three 5 minute opening-closing-running-the-program sessions, I deleted Jaikoz.
Not worth a plug nickel unless you purchase the program (my opinion).
(It did find the 20 song meta-data each session, but takes way to long for me)

I downloaded the app BubbleUPnP and it worked great!
I had already configured Twonky Server many moons ago, and now I turned off I-tunes (which was only used for a week because I thought I needed it for meta-data).
BubbleUPnP found all my music, let me pick the category I wanted to list my music by and it works like a charm!

Thanks guys for your help!
I’ve got my music streaming and it’s works great with BubbleUPnP!
I will buy it to help out the programmers…

Thanks,
D

[cpt_paranoia]

@Dansmark

After three 5 minute opening-closing-running-the-program sessions, I deleted Jaikoz.

Try

Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...)

[cpt_paranoia]

@Dansmark

I started downloading my music back to my hard-drive so I could use a program (Jaikoz)

You should be able to run programs on the data stored on the MyCloud. There should be no need to have to move it back to the PC hard drive (assuming that’s what you meant).

Map the MyCloud shares as network drives, and access them just like any other disk drive.

[Dansmark]

Just downloaded the mp3tag and will try it on my mp3’s soon.

Thanks!
D

[Dansmark]

I did copy them to my hard-drive for meta data gathering.
I’ll create network paths to the directories I want to check with mp3tag.

So far everything works great!

Thanks,
D