Question on Transition from Twonky

[Budgie]

Hi, my first post here so hello to all and thanks to Simon for addressing the needs of classical music fans. I read with interest the threads on tagging and will share some of my experiences to date using Twonky in due course. But first I must obtain first hand experience of MinimServer.

I am planning the transition from QPKG Twonky (6.0.39) running on Qnap TS559 Pro II to MinimServer but suspect there will be quite a few problems until I get my tagging consistent. We have a medium sized collection (about 20,000 files,) split approximately 50/50 between classical and pop music with most of the classical being opera.

After several false starts, my wife has only just begun to accept and get used to accessing our music collection using Songbook on her phone, (preferring it to Chorus or Kinsky) and if I change the existing setup now and it fails, all my work to date putting collection onto server will be worthless as she will insist on reverting to playing from CDs.

To avoid the above disaster is there any reason why I should not set up and run Twonky my original NAS a Qnap TS 209 Pro II, which holds the backup music data set, while I experiment with MinimServer on the other, or vice versa? Are there any Gotchas having two media servers on the same subnet? Grateful for any thoughts before I take the plunge.

[simoncn]

(09-08-2012 00:36)Budgie Wrote:  Hi, my first post here so hello to all and thanks to Simon for addressing the needs of classical music fans. I read with interest the threads on tagging and will share some of my experiences to date using Twonky in due course. But first I must obtain first hand experience of MinimServer.

I am planning the transition from QPKG Twonky (6.0.39) running on Qnap TS559 Pro II to MinimServer but suspect there will be quite a few problems until I get my tagging consistent. We have a medium sized collection (about 20,000 files,) split approximately 50/50 between classical and pop music with most of the classical being opera.

After several false starts, my wife has only just begun to accept and get used to accessing our music collection using Songbook on her phone, (preferring it to Chorus or Kinsky) and if I change the existing setup now and it fails, all my work to date putting collection onto server will be worthless as she will insist on reverting to playing from CDs.

To avoid the above disaster is there any reason why I should not set up and run Twonky my original NAS a Qnap TS 209 Pro II, which holds the backup music data set, while I experiment with MinimServer on the other, or vice versa? Are there any Gotchas having two media servers on the same subnet? Grateful for any thoughts before I take the plunge.

I think your plan is good, and there shouldn't be any problems with doing this. There were some problems with Twonky 5.x and MinimServer coexistence. but these have been fixed in Twonky 6.0.39.

[Budgie]

Hi Simon,
Many thanks. Will report progress in due course.
Regards,
Budgie

[Hans]

Hi Budgie,

From experience: no problems with running both. But I don't see why Minim wouldn't work for your wife. She will love it even more because now she can choose if she wants alphabetical order or numbers (is CD order) in the Songbook screen.
The only minus with minim is that you'll have to refresh manually. Other than that: better than Twonky.

[Dieter Stockert]

(11-08-2012 07:32)Hans Wrote:  From experience: no problems with running both. But I don't see why Minim wouldn't work for your wife. She will love it even more because now she can choose if she wants alphabetical order or numbers (is CD order) in the Songbook screen.
The only minus with minim is that you'll have to refresh manually. Other than that: better than Twonky.

+1

[mikejazz]

(11-08-2012 08:27)Dieter Stockert Wrote:  

(11-08-2012 07:32)Hans Wrote:  From experience: no problems with running both. But I don't see why Minim wouldn't work for your wife. She will love it even more because now she can choose if she wants alphabetical order or numbers (is CD order) in the Songbook screen.
The only minus with minim is that you'll have to refresh manually. Other than that: better than Twonky.

+1

By the way, on my windows 7 installation, the "refresh" options is not available...it's "grayed".

[simoncn]

(11-08-2012 14:51)mikejazz Wrote:  By the way, on my windows 7 installation, the "refresh" options is not available...it's "grayed".

The Refresh option is only available with MinimWatch. It refreshes the list of remote MinimServer instances on your LAN. If you want MinimServer to re-read your music files from the disk, you need to select Restart.

I think it would be a good idea for me to remove Refresh (and Close) from the MinimServer icon menu to avoid confusion.

[andreas]

(09-08-2012 00:36)Budgie Wrote:  To avoid the above disaster is there any reason why I should not set up and run Twonky my original NAS a Qnap TS 209 Pro II, which holds the backup music data set, while I experiment with MinimServer on the other, or vice versa? Are there any Gotchas having two media servers on the same subnet? Grateful for any thoughts before I take the plunge.

You can run several media servers on the same LAN or even on the same server. I run both Twonky 6.0.39 and MinimServer 0.52 on my Qnap TS-419P+.

[Budgie]

(11-08-2012 22:23)andreas Wrote:  

(09-08-2012 00:36)Budgie Wrote:  To avoid the above disaster is there any reason why I should not set up and run Twonky my original NAS a Qnap TS 209 Pro II, which holds the backup music data set, while I experiment with MinimServer on the other, or vice versa? Are there any Gotchas having two media servers on the same subnet? Grateful for any thoughts before I take the plunge.

You can run several media servers on the same LAN or even on the same server. I run both Twonky 6.0.39 and MinimServer 0.52 on my Qnap TS-419P+.

Hi all,
Just to let you know I have set up Minimserver on the Qnap TS 209 and I think it is great. Installation instructions perfect in every way and went like a dream after I had turned off all my add-ons in Firefox which mess up the Java download preliminaries.

I prefer Minimserver to Twonky but will need to read again Briain's messages on Genres as I have a few multiple genres set up for Twonky. Minimserver certainly shows up any inconsistencies in tagging so I still have much work to do with classical collection but
overall a big thank you to Simon.
Budgie