My new ND5xs only playing single track

a bit of a update.  I have narrowed the problem to the n-stream ap.  It appears when i manually choose tracks from the ND5 all appears to be ok, the track loads as flac with the correct time, however if  the track from my library in n-stream it says its a pcm track, the time in incorrect and it doesnt play the next track.  Also when i choose the track from the screen in the ND5 is shows im connected to the asset Upnp on the screen an on my n-stream device, but when i choose direcly from my n-stream library it does not.  Any ideas out there?  Im very  confused.

I don't understand your question.

You mention 3 UPnP/DLNA servers.. QNAP 'server', Twonky and Asset. Is the playout behaviour the same on each?

You mention an 'Nstream  Library'. There is no such thing. Nstream is just a display and selection device, it's rather benign. The library or database is always held, managed and presented by the UPnP / DLNA app, so what do you mean here?

Finally the files you play out with the possible length problems? Does this occur on all files? Are these files corrupt? Does a regular ripped CD play ok?

Simon

Simon,

By n-stream library i was referring to what i see on my ios device in n-stream.  Yes it is all the files, but i have only uploaded a few albums from my hard drive in order to determine which server program to go with.  At this point turning upnp compatability mode on in n-serve has recolved my track length issues on all three server programs, but im not getting album art consistently

I feel silly advising here since I'm a newbie to streaming, but all my streaming blues have always been cured by:

 1. Rescanning the files on the NAS using the DLNA server (in my case: Synology Multimedia Server)

 2. Clearing the cache and the images cache in nStream

Sometimes I had to do it twice to get everything to display and play properly.

Marc, and does this happen when running Asset (which works in full mode)? If the UPnP/DLNA has rebuilt the database, as said above you might need to clear file and image cache on Nstream so as to avoid wrong album art appearing for discs etc.

Simon

Simon,
As of now, with compatability mode enabled on n-stream all three server play music w/out issue.  I must confess im having some difficulty trying to understand how to use asset for uploading and file organization. Asset i definately communicating w/my ND5, but when i open the Qnap beta app it appears as only one configuration page. I suspect im missing something.  I would like to get one of these servers to work to my satisfaction so i can begin uploading the rest of my music files from my ext. HD to the NAS.

Marc, Asset won't organise or upload your files. It is simply a UPnP/DLNA server app. You tell it the directories where your files are, and using the metadata from the files, it logically structures the media in its database. Your files could be in one great big flat directory and Asset would structure the albums from the metadata. No data is moved, it's simply logically organised in its database. This is the database that NStream effectively browses.

Asset does not need to be run in compatibility mode with Naim. But your ND5 player needs to be able to see the server/media, which I suspect it can.

Simon

Simon,

Ty for your response, and forgive my lack of knowlege here.  Are you saying i can just upload all my music files into a multimedia share folder? I tried doing this but i got spooked because all the files seemed mixed up together.  From what i can tell so far to uploading a album i have to open up the folder in my HD and then choose the tracks.  Im adfraid im loosing some ogf the album art in this process.  Once again sorry for the newbie q's.

ty

Yes, you can, but I would recommend making a directory structure for them. Your DNLA server app will be able to scan and find those files (and build a database just like Simon explained) even if they are several subdirectories deep. I have a folder for each Album Artist and subfolders for each Album of the given Album Artist.

Later you may want to try out TagScanner. Based on the advice on this forum I use it to organize my 1000+ ripped CDs on the NAS disk. It can even do things like look in your file's Tags, see who is the Album Artist and what is the Album's name, then create a subdirectory for that Album and move the files there.

PS. Just 4 weeks ago I was more lost than you... I can now see, browse and play my entire collection on ND5XS via nStream thanks to the folks' patience on this forum!

Yes you could mix them all up if the meta data is set correctly.

Album art can be either incorporated into each file - and that will work well if all the files are mixed up.

Alternatively sometimes the album art is put into a file called folder.jpg (or similar) as opposed to each file. In which case the tracks of an album need to be in their own directory along with the folder.jpg art file. However the name or structure of this directory does not appear in Nstream. Remember Nstream gets its structure from the logical database build from metadata by the UPnP/DLNA app.

Simon

yes lost would be accurate..lol..im at the point where asset is working, but i think my lack of knowlege on file organization is reaping havoc...I have been saving my uploads from my HD to NAS is a multimedia folder, this is the folder thtat asset gets everthing from..Where can i find more info on the proper way to organize these files?

Again, I feel silly advising, since I'm a newbie myself, but I just went through this whole path (including many a detour and dead end), so...

What software do you use to rip CDs? If you use dbPoweramp, which is the No 1 recommended software on this forum (and not only), it will organize files quite nicely for you. It will create directories for your artists and sub-directories for each album by that artist. This is a very neat way of storing music and a good one to start with. If you want to move to a more complex structure one day by e.g. setting up separate folders for "Classical", "Rock" , "Jazz", etc., you can always easily do it later with a tag-editing software, e.g. Media Monkey (which I hate) and TagScanner (which I love

This structure created by dbPoweramp will not always be perfect, because some CDs may be automatically tagged as "The Who" and some as "Who, The". So two different directories would get created on the disk. But you can merge those manually in Windows, or use TagScanner later to do it automatically.

What you may want to pay attention when ripping CDs is the all-important tags that are normally read by dbPoweramp from online databases, but are often not quite what we want. The one I correct most frequently is "Album Artist". By default it will usually say: "Mary Black" while I want it to be "Black, Mary" - otherwise I will end up looking for her CDs under letter M instead of B. It also will also put a lot of bands under letter "T" (The Beatles) so you may want to correct it to "Beatles, The". You can do those simple corrections every time you put in a new CD for ripping.

Again, if you don't get it right, don't worry - everything can be fixed with Media Monkey or TagScanner later.

Unfortunantly the music has already been ripped or  downloaded.  The vast majority of it is Flac and fillmost og my external 1TB hardrive connected to a macmini that i was using as a music server before with a Dac v-1.  At the risk of sounding stupid i can you tag scanner to help organize my files in the media folder?  Does it do anything w/album art? .

Yes, it can. It can actually create directories based on tag info (such as "Album Artist" tag and "Album" tag) and move the files into the correct directories. Check out TagScanner, it's free and it lets you preview what's gonna happen before you actually commit the changes to disk. Spend some time playing with it, experiment with a few albums copied into a separate folder as an exercise. You'll get the hang of it quickly and then you can attack your entire collection (although, if space allows, I would still back it up before you start organizing it).

Maybe it's the digital version of one of these:

In a more useful vein; mp3tag can to all tagging activities; I don't know if it is out in a Mac version though.  I don't think it does anything with album art, but is=t can help you organize them.