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What solution fits my needs: Network Share? NAS? Streamer? -- Media Sharing (+ Streaming) Across Windows, Mac, and Android

654 views 3 replies 4 participants last post by  tycoonbob 
#1 ·
TL;DR: I have Windows & Mac computers, Android music players, an iPod, a Projector, and FLAC & DVD ISO files. Computers need to manage/access media, PMPs need to sync music on both Windows/Mac platforms, and it would be nice to control the device that's hooked up to the Projector, and I need to be able to rip into the library that I will be storing my media into.

For the last few months, my girlfriend has been pestering me to set up sharing for my media, since we're in that serious stage where we want to combine our libraries. Currently, everything is done on my desktop, such as ripping new music, or adding new music to the PMPs, and we want to independently be able to do tasks on our own computers. Our libraries span multiple drives/arrays, thanks to having to keep multiple formats of each file, as well as backups.

I don't know if I need just a simple shared drive/folders, a NAS, or a media streamer to tackle these tasks--I've done a lot of research, and everything points to me having to re-do my file format or stop using my favorite program.

Tasks I perform now:
1. Rip music with EAC, tagging during the rip process
1a. Files are stored as FLAC for archival purposes
1b. Files are then converted to WMA lossless, for better integration with Windows Media Player (search, playlist functionality is important as you will see later)
2. Rip DVDs as ISOs--I prefer ISOs for the menus/extra content, and it's just so easy to rip whole ISOs, hard drive space be damned
3. Play my WMA lossless files in WMP
3a. I rate my music with stars, I need these stars to carry across platforms/media players
3b. I still work on tags (I had issues with FLAC tags not reading/writing correctly in WMP)
3d. I like my autoplaylists such as recently added music during the last month/week, or music of a certain star rating
4. Sync music to my Android PMPs in WMP
4a. I create playlists/sync lists and can drag-drop into my Android devices
4b.WMP also automatically transcodes my WMAs into 320KB/sec MP3s (after a registry hack)
5. Play my DVDs in VLC
5a. I mount in Alcohol and then play in VLC. I know I can auto-play in WMC direct from explorer
5b. This movie part of my workflow I'm totally open to improving when I have the solution set up (i.e. I'm open to playing ISOs on a media streamer and then the video streams to a NUC or laptop that's hooked up to my projector).

My gf is a smart cookie and learns quickly, I just want her to be able to do these tasks on the same library I'm using.

Tedious tasks that really suck:
1 If I rip a CD, after my rip process, I have to transcode it to MP3 then move it to my gf's computer and then it imports into her iTunes
2. If I rip a DVD, I have to transfer the 7GB ISO to a flash drive (slow even w. USB 3.0), and she plays it from there. Her 256GB SSD isn't enough to carry a big collection of videos around, so it would be nice to be able to stream a movie to that computer

Things that don't work
1. WMA in iTunes (or iTunes in general, for that matter. Crashes all the time in Windows, doesn't work with my Android devices, etc.)
2. Syncing the gf's Android device using her Mac, since all the music is on my PC library. We had a bit of success with creating a Winamp library of music on her own computer and wireless syncing, but since our music is stored on an external SD card, that doesn't push music to the right storage location.
3. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I had very slow performance when trying to share my (very large) WMP library. What about speeds accessing a large library on a shared drive?

Things we want to add into the mix:
1. She has an iPod classic she likes to use, but hasn't been able to because she hasn't been able to put new music on it, and iTunes doesn't work with my WMA lossless files.
1a. We can rockbox it/use DoubleTwist or anything that works with the primary music library.
2.I have a projector that I'd like to set up. I'd like for a device to be hooked up to it that can play movies. Bonus points if I can control it.
2a. My projector is on one side of the room, my desktop is on the other. Say I had the server/streamer set up on that side of the room, I could have the projector hooked up and I could play movies on the projector, stream to my gf's mac, and I could search/edit tags in my library without any lagging
3. Torrenting support--It would be nice to send disc images to her parents--say we make a CD mix, and write it as an ISO, email the Torrent. We have ISO burning configured on their computer, so they only have to load in a blank, click on the torrented ISO, and poof they have a CD that plays in their ancient equipment without understanding libraries, burning, or playlists.

Experience/Current Research/Possible Solutions:

* I've looked into Plex, a bit of XMBC, simple SMB sharing, Windows HomeGroups, etc. In the past I knew that
* I'm comfortable with playing around a bit to get things working--I've set up SubSonic in the past (that worked really great for single songs, but the UI just doesn't match a real music player for daily use. I also had some issues with playlists)
* What I was thinking (and could be totally wrong): Buy a cheap NUC ($200 barebones 4010U), hook up some USB 3.0 drives for storage, and hook it up to projector?
 
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#3 ·
All i can say is i would be surprised if you find one program to do everything you listed. I would look into multiple programs, you will definitely want a "server" to host all of these files. The reason is so you can set up shares for certain programs to use to access the media. I would look into programs like XBMC (Kodia, with mysql database), Plex, Mediabrowser 3, Subsonic, Madsonic, just to name a few that come to my mind right away. For you project either use a long HDMI cable since your desktop is in the same room, a dedicated PC, something like a raspberry pi, something like a Roku. You won't find the "best" all in one solution to do this in my opinion, not everything would be able to integrate with each other or it will be complicated to set up.
 
#4 ·
I agree with cones.

I use Madsonic (a fantastic fork of SubSonic, and actually am upgrading to the new 5.1 final build today) to stream my FLAC audio over my LAN, and WAN. there is an awesome music player called Clementine that can also connect to my MadSonic server, if I wanted an actual desktop app.

While I don't use ISO for my videos (I use MKV containers, 1080p blu-ray rips), XBMC/Kodi works great for me (in the form of OpenELEC), and even has a MadSonic plugin to play content from MadSonic. I built my HTPC for like $300 (build log in sig), which I think is more than affordable.

VortexBox may be something that would interest you...can rip your CDs directly to FLAC and MP3, has NFS and CIFS built in, supports Sonos, Plex, XBMC, SubSonic, and can share MP3s to iTunes. Might be worth testing out for you. It's primarily a music server, so it won't take care of your videos..but you're not going to find one solution that does it all.
 
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