Playback uPnP Issues

The nightmare regarding classical music can be somewhat appeased by installing the custom browse pluglin under LMS. This makes it possible to browse by composers. Even better, you can also define the hirachy. So you can specify to browse by composer --> album artist --> album ...   or by composer --> album ...

It'll cost you 20$ but it is money well spent.

Sorry, I didn't mean anything about you on the shooting comment. I meant the thread in general.

Thanks. I just ordered a QNAP 219PII as a 2 bay solution, probably to be used as a 4 TB RAID0. $259 from Amazon...or five tanks of fuel in Phil's currency. 

Thanks. If I can get the folder browsing to work as expected, tags are completely unnecessary. I'm using LMS on my office system and have no complaints.

No worries. The problem with the written word etc etc 

Have you already ordered disks for the 219?

With ref to LMS take a look at the thread "NDX and UPnP Quesions" to save yourself a headache setting it up.

Let us know how you get on...

I have three 4 TB RAID0 drives. Two are used for my music and video media (one a backup of the other). I will pull disks out of one of those.

I will look for that thread. Thanks for the heads up.

I am installing my QNAP TS-219P II as a 4 TB RAID 0. It's formatting the disks now. 

Let's see how much frustration I can experience before I can finally relax to music on my ND5XS. 

Racetripper... are you using single 4tb drive as Raid 0? If not single drive you better off with Raid 1 to mirror first drive.

Dan

RAID 0 is not possible with single drive. I am using two 2 TB drives for RAID 0. I have another external 4 TB RAID 0 to use for backup of the NAS.

Dean

RaceTripper, good idea to have 2nd NAS unit as backup.

Dan

Indeed. RAID (1, 5, 10 or otherwise) is not backup.

The second isn't a NAS. It's just an external RAID 0. I plan to connect it to the NAS via USB and use the pushbutton backup feature.

The hard part so far was giving it a name. As my Mac Mini is Josquin, the NAS is now Mahler. 

Dean

I have 3tb drive in Thermotake BlacX 5G dock connected to usb of Netgear NAS to do backup. Yes, you are correct Raid 1.5, 10 etc is not backup. A lot of people make mistake using Raid as backup.

Dan

What people don't get is if the RAID controller dies, everything is lost. 

Further to Phil's post, I think there is a degree of confusion between disaster recovery and resilience with NASes.

A mirrored disk system provides for resilience around the most likely component failure, the hard disk. In the 10 years or so I have audio streamed, this has happened to me twice. I also regularly check (about once a month) the  disc parameters for early failure signs whilst the disc and data integrity remains  (bad sectors, read write errors etc). A good NAS makes this straightforward such as a ReadyNAS.

 The controller or  it's PSU can fail, albeit less likely if you keep powered up. In consumer land resilience here is rare so there  will be downtime whilst these are repaired or identically replaced so the discs can be recovered. Again I encourage a UPS to help reduce strain on NAS discs, RAID journaling  and PSUs with unexpected outages.

There is then the issue of mass data corruption, destruction/theft  or accidental deletion. This is what normally i would call disaster recovery... Here the approach is to recover the data by copying from an ideally manually controlled archive or re ripping (slow..). Ideally this archive should be quite physically separate and preferably remote from the main NAS.  

The mistake people make is that hardware resilience is not them same as disaster recovery.

Simon

RT, is it doing as required on the music front?

I'm still working on setting it up, and haven't had much time to work on it yet. It's running twonky and I have all my music copied over. I still need to get it working for LMS. But so far it seems to work fine with n-Stream, although some cover art isn't displaying.

I've had to rebuild arrays after controller failures in both pro and consumer applications. If the replacement controller looks the same, it may not be due to firmware or other differences. I have three identical RAID 0 enclosures. I've had to rebuild an array moving disks from one to the other.

Nevertheless, my real point is that some people mistake mirroring for backup, and that is not a safe assumption to make.

What UPnP server are poeple using for their NAS? Mine has Twonky and it's just awful. Worse than where I was before.

For example, it has totally screwed up the ordering of tracks. For example, Handel's Orlando (an opera) is now organized alphabetically by song title rather than by the ordered tracks, which is a ridiculous arrangement.

I am in the process of installing LMS. Hopefully, the UPnP service it has will work better.

Are you going in by artist?

Should be OK if you go in by either album or artist/album.

Anyway, ref LMS - don't forget that thread where PH gave me some pointers on getting it going

BTW This wasn't obvious to me initially because I only had one album per most artists. When you think about it going in without the context of an album it makes sense for it to use alphabetiical track order...

Not really. All the other UPnP servers got it right, by using the track numbering. Every one I tried. Twonky is stripping the track number prefix and sorting by the remaining title. Very bad!!!

Still waiting for LMS to finish downloading and installing. I'll have to check back later when I return home.

By right you mean you'd see all the track 1's then all the track 2's etc? Seems as wrong as alphabetical to me.

Even with Twonky if you go in by Album or Artist/Album it should be in correct order though?

No, I see tracks in order 01, 02, 03...10, 11, ...20...etc.

I have lots of classical music, and it has always played in order, until today.

Listening to an opera or other multi-movement classical works out of order is unacceptable, of course.