QNAP/TwonkyMedia - faulty sorting of music files

Posted by: Olaf on 16 December 2011

I bought an ND5XS a short while ago and it is excellent. Its a great little box.

 

However, I am extremely frustrated by the uPNP server on my NAS. QNAP is recommended by Naim and comes preloaded with TwonkyMedia as the uPnP server. All good so far. and it does stream music very well - as long as you are happy listening to your tracks played in alphabetical file order. ie not in the order tracks appears on the CD and not in the order the composer wrote them in!

 

Now, its seems to me there are two possible solutions:

  1. we persuade long-deceased composers to rename their movements alphabetically ....
  2. we ask Naim to put some pressure on Twonky to fix their faulty software.

Its interesting to see that the Twonky forum is awash with complaints from users about this exact issue and has been for 18 months. Twonky remains silent.

 

Until this is fixed, I strongly suggest that any prospective purchaser consider whether he/she will be happy playing CD tracks alphabetically. If not, then choose an alternative uPnP...which regrettably also means, not QNAP - which is a shame as its otherwise an excellent NAS.

Posted on: 16 December 2011 by caftan
Did you try to play/find your music files on the nas by album instead of folder and etc?
Posted on: 16 December 2011 by Olaf

Thanks for the reply and yes and that does work.

However, the issue then is to find the album in the first place. While I know that I have Mozart's piano sonata x, I couldn't tell you what the album is called. And searching through 7-800 albums is really not viable.

Any other suggestions?

Posted on: 17 December 2011 by garyi

Cannot help if your entire drive is mozarts 5th by a thousand different people but twonky on my qnap is just fine, search by artist, this then delivers all the artists in alphabetical followed by the albums in alphabetical.

 

 

Also in the qnap interface there is a bunch of optional installs including an update to twonky if you wanted to try that.

Posted on: 17 December 2011 by POV005

I also have the alphabetical issue as I am sorting by folder. If I chose to search by fx artist, I could by accident chose something from my Itunes library - which my Unity cannot read nor can the Twonky transcode it !! I damn the thing !!  When the Unity can read an Ipod from the USB-plug why can`t it read files streamed from Itunes ?? I don`t understand.....

If anyone has a solution - how to stream ALAC from QNAP/Twonky to Unity

please come forward.

 

Best Regards

Poul

Posted on: 17 December 2011 by Graham Hull

When ripping my CDs I put the composer's name against the artist tag. I then added any artist details to the album name. You can then use the Artist/ Album option in n-stream and tracks are sorted correctly. It works for me but it is a shame that Twonky does not have a Composer/ Album option. It seems that all equipment is geared towards pop music.

 

Posted on: 17 December 2011 by Olaf
Originally Posted by garyi:

Cannot help if your entire drive is mozarts 5th by a thousand different people but twonky on my qnap is just fine, search by artist, this then delivers all the artists in alphabetical followed by the albums in alphabetical.

 

 

Also in the qnap interface there is a bunch of optional installs including an update to twonky if you wanted to try that.

Hi Gayi, yes, that all works fine. The issue is within each CD: music tracks play alphabetically, which is a nonsense.

I have upgraded TM firmware to the latest and it still doesn't work.

Posted on: 18 December 2011 by garyi
This is most odd. However there are plenty of options to change in the twonkky interface log onto you nas via a browser, then application severs thentwonky in here is the link. Have a rummage in there.

One other thing, if you don't want the itunes music showing, then don't keep it in the multimedia folder, and / or stop twonky from scanning it.
Posted on: 19 December 2011 by roo
Originally Posted by Olaf:
Originally Posted by garyi:

Cannot help if your entire drive is mozarts 5th by a thousand different people but twonky on my qnap is just fine, search by artist, this then delivers all the artists in alphabetical followed by the albums in alphabetical.

 

 

Also in the qnap interface there is a bunch of optional installs including an update to twonky if you wanted to try that.

Hi Gayi, yes, that all works fine. The issue is within each CD: music tracks play alphabetically, which is a nonsense.

I have upgraded TM firmware to the latest and it still doesn't work.

My QNAP nas with Twonky 6.0.34 doesn't have this issue. I ripped my albums to FLAC with dBpoweramp 14.2 and I think dBpoweramp works round the sorting issue by naming the tracks with a numbered prefix e.g. 01 Doors, The - Soul Kitchen. You could write a script (if you are technically savvy enough) to trawl through all of your albums and look for a Track tag and use that to rename the file.

 

Presentation issues are a major gripe with Twonky. I'd like to see albums for an artist shown by release date instead of alphabetically and the only way I may be able to achieve this is to rename the album folders with a numeric prefix. I'll have to try that and see if it works.

Posted on: 19 December 2011 by garyi

Well the OP may have had an issue at the import and tagging stage, in which case its not the fault of twonkey in this instance.

Posted on: 19 December 2011 by sbilotta

Hi Olaf,

had the same issues when I had Qnap.

I solved it by uploading some custom scripts created by another expert Qnap/Twonky user.

Here is a link to a Qnap forum thread that I used to solve this issue.

 

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=177&t=29318&p=176162#p176162

Let me know if you have issues.

 

Bye.

Stefano