Syncing itunes playlists and metadata with Infrant NAS

[acgourley]

I’m trying figure out the best way to manage playlists and stream them off my NAS. From what I’ve seen, the best way it to use firefly 1.0.0 and have feed it your iTunes XML.

I need a little more help though. When firefly reads in the XML in it’s base music directory, how does it then know what files the playlists point to? When I first tried to set this up, firefly found the playlists but they were all blank. This makes sense since if you look at the XML the paths to the music files are absolute paths which only make sense to the computer that the itunes XML was taken from.

I’ve also tried to have itunes create a new library in-place on the NAS while pointing at a music directory also on the nas, but this doesn’t work either.

Basically I just want to know how firefly decides where a given music file lives based on the data in the XML. I should be able to sufficiently fool it once I know how it works, maybe with symlinks or something.

Thanks

[rpedde]

@acgourley wrote:

I’m trying figure out the best way to manage playlists and stream them off my NAS. From what I’ve seen, the best way it to use firefly 1.0.0 and have feed it your iTunes XML.

I need a little more help though. When firefly reads in the XML in it’s base music directory, how does it then know what files the playlists point to? When I first tried to set this up, firefly found the playlists but they were all blank. This makes sense since if you look at the XML the paths to the music files are absolute paths which only make sense to the computer that the itunes XML was taken from.

I’ve also tried to have itunes create a new library in-place on the NAS while pointing at a music directory also on the nas, but this doesn’t work either.

Basically I just want to know how firefly decides where a given music file lives based on the data in the XML. I should be able to sufficiently fool it once I know how it works, maybe with symlinks or something.

Thanks

There is a post here: http://forums.fireflymediaserver.org/viewtopic.php?t=6087

that discusses how it tries to remap directories to relocate music. Bear in mind that if you are using windows as a client, you should probably:

1. upgrade to svn-1586 on http://nightlies.mt-daapd.org, as that fixes some windows stuff regarding mapping drive letters to unc paths and vice versa

2. read the faq entry (http://wiki.fireflymediaserver.org/FAQ) on sharing music over network shares (if that is what you are doing), as there are permissions and drive mapping issues involved in that.

3. (again, assuming windows) Make sure you have both your “my music” folder, and the directory the music is actually at specified in your music directories. It’s preferable to specify the remote music location by UNC.

That should get you where you need to go. If that doesn’t go, more information would help:

What client, where the music is (and how it’s connected), where the server is running (windows box or nas device), where the iTunes xml file is, etc. There are lots of issues involved depending on where the server is running, how the music was copied, etc.

— Ron

[stretch]

1. upgrade to svn-1586 on http://nightlies.mt-daapd.org, as that fixes some windows stuff regarding mapping drive letters to unc paths and vice versa

As you’re using an Infrant ReadyNAS you’ll have to use the beta firmware if you want the 1586 version of firefly. To make things easier, it’s already built in.

If you’re using version 3 firmware on the NAS then you don’t have root access so you’re stuck with the Firefly 1.0 addon provided by Infrant.

[acgourley]

@rpedde wrote:

There is a post here: http://forums.fireflymediaserver.org/viewtopic.php?t=6087

that discusses how it tries to remap directories to relocate music. Bear in mind that if you are using windows as a client, you should probably:

Awesome, that’s what I was looking for. The reverse directory walk is clever.

Unfortunately, I’m still running into problems. I have my infrant NAS running firefly 1.0.0 (the only version that they have a binary for). I’m using osx 10.4 with the latest iTunes and I connect to the nas via AFP.

The library is located on the ‘media’ volume like this:

/c/media/iTunes/
/c/media/iTunes/iTunes Library.xml

Firefly is pointing at:
/c/media/iTunes/

I generated this playlist by telling iTunes that my music library is on the NAS and to put the itunes xml there as well. Effectively I want my iTunes to directly manage the firefly media server without needing to rsync files over periodically. That may seem weird, but this should not be the cause of my problems, as the bottom line is what the itunes XML looks like and what the filestructure on the nas is. I’ll describe that after I describe my problem.

Problem: When I do a Full Scan, it will find all the music and make a single smart playlist called ‘library’ but it doesn’t have any of my iTunes smart playlists nor does it have a custom static one I made.

The static playlist “untitled playlist” was created with a daft punk song. I checked the iTunes xml and indeed there is a “untitled playlist” which points to a daft punk song with the following location:

file://localhost/Volumes/media/iTunes/Daft%20Punk/Human%20After%20All/09%20technologic.mp3

(that is the path to a network file on my mac)

The filepath on the NAS is:

/c/media/iTunes/iTunes Library.xml
/c/media/iTunes/Daft Punk/Human After All/09 technologic.mp3

So as far as I can tell, it should be both finding the playlist and finding the song for the playlist, but it’s not finding either. I suppose the first hurdle is getting the playlist to appear at all, even if it can’t find the songs for it. I have gotten it to work in the past but it won’t work now, am I doing anything glaringly wrong? If so, let me know, otherwise I’ll try to start over with a less weird way of doing things.

And thanks for all the hard work on this project.

[rpedde]

@acgourley wrote:

@rpedde wrote:

There is a post here: http://forums.fireflymediaserver.org/viewtopic.php?t=6087

that discusses how it tries to remap directories to relocate music. Bear in mind that if you are using windows as a client, you should probably:

Awesome, that’s what I was looking for. The reverse directory walk is clever.

Unfortunately, I’m still running into problems. I have my infrant NAS running firefly 1.0.0 (the only version that they have a binary for). I’m using osx 10.4 with the latest iTunes and I connect to the nas via AFP.

The library is located on the ‘media’ volume like this:

/c/media/iTunes/
/c/media/iTunes/iTunes Library.xml

Firefly is pointing at:
/c/media/iTunes/

I generated this playlist by telling iTunes that my music library is on the NAS and to put the itunes xml there as well. Effectively I want my iTunes to directly manage the firefly media server without needing to rsync files over periodically. That may seem weird, but this should not be the cause of my problems, as the bottom line is what the itunes XML looks like and what the filestructure on the nas is. I’ll describe that after I describe my problem.

Problem: When I do a Full Scan, it will find all the music and make a single smart playlist called ‘library’ but it doesn’t have any of my iTunes smart playlists nor does it have a custom static one I made.

The static playlist “untitled playlist” was created with a daft punk song. I checked the iTunes xml and indeed there is a “untitled playlist” which points to a daft punk song with the following location:

file://localhost/Volumes/media/iTunes/Daft%20Punk/Human%20After%20All/09%20technologic.mp3

(that is the path to a network file on my mac)

The filepath on the NAS is:

/c/media/iTunes/iTunes Library.xml
/c/media/iTunes/Daft Punk/Human After All/09 technologic.mp3

So as far as I can tell, it should be both finding the playlist and finding the song for the playlist, but it’s not finding either. I suppose the first hurdle is getting the playlist to appear at all, even if it can’t find the songs for it. I have gotten it to work in the past but it won’t work now, am I doing anything glaringly wrong? If so, let me know, otherwise I’ll try to start over with a less weird way of doing things.

And thanks for all the hard work on this project.

It should *always* find the playlist. If it can’t locate files, then the playlists are empty.

If it doesn’t find the playlist, might check the web config interface (or the config file) and see that process_m3u is on, as well as process_xml.

That should really be it.

— Ron

[Author]

Posts