MinimServer comparison with Synology Media Server

[simoncn]

I've been asked about the main advantages of MinimServer compared with Synology Media Server. From a quick look at Synology Media Server, it seems to me that the most important differences are:

1) MinimServer allows all tags to be indexed; Synology Media Server supports only Album, AlbumArtist, Composer, Genre and Date.

2) MinimServer provides Intelligent Browsing; Synology Media Server provides customizable multistep browsing trees.

Can anyone with more experience of Synology Media Server suggest any other significant advantages of MinimServer?

[winxi]

(03-12-2013 13:04)simoncn Wrote:  I've been asked about the main advantages of MinimServer compared with Synology Media Server. From a quick look at Synology Media Server, it seems to me that the most important differences are:

1) MinimServer allows all tags to be indexed; Synology Media Server supports only Album, AlbumArtist, Composer, Genre and Date.

2) MinimServer provides Intelligent Browsing; Synology Media Server provides customizable multistep browsing trees.

Can anyone with more experience of Synology Media Server suggest any other significant advantages of MinimServer?

I think that it is about the details and every single feature of MinimServer can be considered as an advantage. These are the features which come to my mind at first:

3) Alpha grouping

4) Handling of multi-disc albums

5) The tag formating options

6) The most significant advantage of MinimServer will be the support of UPnP search which you have announced for the next release.

7) The log which contains useful information about tagging errors

8) The sorting capabilities

[sleask]

I thought I would give the synology server a try again yesterday, I did try it out in the past but I had nothing but problems with it, yesterday was no different. My dac (PWD) sounds better with transcoding enabled so I set up the synology to do this.
The first problem I had was the synology audio player app(iPad) could not find the dac, so back to plugplayer. the second concern was I had no idea what bit rates it was transcoding to because I could hear no clicking, my dac will click every time the bit rates change, the dac showed that 16/44 flac file was coming in at 24/96 wave, the only time the dac switched over was with 24/192 wav file, it would not play a 24/192 flac files. Sometimes while playing 24/192 wav album it would not advance to the next track. While playing 24/192 wav I would also experience drop outs.
So personally I feel the most significant advantage of Minimserver is that it works and synology’s doesn’t.
(For transcoding)

[mikejazz]

Agree with the previous,

on another perspective Synology have one interesting "default" option that I like and Minimserver does not have (by "default", but I think it's possible to configure)...: The list or group of "recently added" to the library...nice to find quickly your newest music and make sure you really listen to them!

I will create a thread with that question...

[DavidHB]

(03-12-2013 13:53)winxi Wrote:  I think that it is about the details and every single feature of MinimServer can be considered as an advantage.

I agree with the second half of this statement, but I would question the first half.

It is clear from the documentation and from replies Simon has given on the forum, that MinimServer is the product of a clear and coherent design philosophy. Its core virtues are therefore less in individual features (valuable as they are) than in such things as reliability and maintainability, the focus on music streaming (not video or images), standards compliance and (relative) platform independence. Where device manufacturers' products provide even some of these benefits, they often seem to do so by retreating within the DNLA cocoon, probably because DNLA is now a better known and more consumer-oriented brand than UPnP AV. It is in the nature of DNLA to be feature limited.

MinimServer gives us both the core virtues and the features (particularly in the promised new version). I cannot think of any good reason to look elsewhere.

David

[sleask]

Just a heads up, I would recommend not installing synology’s DS audio package if you are running minim server. When I was testing it the other day I had accidently installed it on my main system drives,(will explain this at the end) everything was screwed up, the controller app, minim, and SQ. just uninstalling the ds audio package did not fix the problem I had to do a complete reset and reinstall DSM, Java and minim. After this everything was working perfect again.
Note, you will not lose your files after a reset, at least I didn’t.
Note, if you want to test stuff you can power down the synology and remove all your drives, install different drives, reload and play around. When done you can power down swap out the drives again, (making sure they are in the same order) and everything will be fine. I cannot guaranty it but I have been doing it for quite some time without any problem.

[winxi]

(09-12-2013 16:49)sleask Wrote:  Just a heads up, I would recommend not installing synology’s DS audio package if you are running minim server. When I was testing it the other day I had accidently installed it on my main system drives,(will explain this at the end) everything was screwed up, the controller app, minim, and SQ. just uninstalling the ds audio package did not fix the problem I had to do a complete reset and reinstall DSM, Java and minim. After this everything was working perfect again.
Note, you will not lose your files after a reset, at least I didn’t.
Note, if you want to test stuff you can power down the synology and remove all your drives, install different drives, reload and play around. When done you can power down swap out the drives again, (making sure they are in the same order) and everything will be fine. I cannot guaranty it but I have been doing it for quite some time without any problem.

Do you mean the Synology Audio Station when you say 'synology’s DS audio package'? What do you mean by screwed up?
I'm running the Audio Station along with MinimServer without any problems so far. I've also never experienced any incompatibility issues of MinimServer with other packages on my Synology.

[sleask]

Sorry, yes I did mean audio station. The control app, plugplayer, kept dropping minimserver and going back to the ipad library, I could not delete the play lists it kept reloading them and not playing anything, once it even loaded every song in my library to the play list and I could not do anything so I uninstalled plugplayer and reinstalled it and the play list returned, I deleted it again and rebooted everything and then the playlist was gone. even after rebooting everything I still had these problems. Sometimes it would only play one song. Artwork stopped appearing on the dac and ipad, even drop outs in the music.
I did not experience these problems in the past either but this time I loaded audio station after minim maybe this was the problem? I don’t know but after a fresh load of dsm and minim everything worked perfectly again.

[winxi]

(09-12-2013 17:52)sleask Wrote:  Sorry, yes I did mean audio station. The control app, plugplayer, kept dropping minimserver and going back to the ipad library, I could not delete the play lists it kept reloading them and not playing anything, once it even loaded every song in my library to the play list and I could not do anything so I uninstalled plugplayer and reinstalled it and the play list returned, I deleted it again and rebooted everything and then the playlist was gone. even after rebooting everything I still had these problems. Sometimes it would only play one song. Artwork stopped appearing on the dac and ipad, even drop outs in the music.
I did not experience these problems in the past either but this time I loaded audio station after minim maybe this was the problem? I don’t know but after a fresh load of dsm and minim everything worked perfectly again.

The Audio Station acts as a control point. Did you try playing a playlist from the Audio Station to your renderer? This would explain some of the symptoms you've described when you did attempt to control your renderer with PlugPlayer at the same time. Using two control points for the same regular UPnP renderer at the same time is not recommended and usually leads to weird and unpredictable results.

This does not explain why these issues did persist after uninstalling Audio Station, though. However, I can't think of any possibiliy how this could be related to the MinimServer package.

[sleask]

No I was not trying to play anything from audio station at the same time or loaded a play list from it, but this was still happening after I uninstalled audio station, Maybe when I installed audio station It corrupted dsm or minim somehow.