Nas / Q NAP/ Apple Mac / Set Up

[Walt61]

I have been recommended to use Minimserve via users of the Naim forum.

I currently have my music stored on a QNap Nas drive, and have my music files stored in wav format. I can stream music directly from my Nas to my Naim system using Twonky whilst the Mac is turned off.

I use the Naim streaming app on my i pad and i phone in order to manage the streaming.

Album details and artwork do not appear on either device during this process, despite being contained within the folders.

I have been advised to convert from wav to flac, and then use minim serve as the media server in order to do this.
In order to avoid many hours of wasted effort, and then failing to achieve my goal of having album, track details and artwork appear on my devices, whilst playing high quality audio files, can you explain in as simple a language as possible (for a seriously non techie Mac user) the best way to go about achieving my objectives.
It is also essential that I am able to stream without the mac needing to be turned ON !
I would also like advice on the possibility of creating playlists via minimserver.
I have read the accompanying literature with your product, and am beginning to think it is the way forward for me !

[uk75]

Welcome to the forum!
As discussed several times, WAV does not provide a proper way to include additional information (so-called tags). Therefore, any serious streaming will usually make use of FLAC or ALAC files. Alac works out of the box with Apple gear, but I would suggest going for FLAC as it has broader support.

WAV files can be batch converted to Flac using a number of programs (I am not a Mac guy, so no suggestions from me - google produced this: http://www.freac.org/). Start by converting a single folder and see what the results are. With regard to tags, well, you may be able to generate them automatically from your file names and the folder structure (e.g. folder name = Artist, subfolder = Album, File name = Track-Title.flac). But usually, it is worthwhile going the extra mile tagging all albums by hand, as there is more to music than just Artist, Album, Track & Title (how about year, composer, genre...?).

There is a dedicated sub-forum here that deals with questions regarding Tagging.
Software (not used by me): e.g. http://kid3.sourceforge.net/


Other thoughts:
You can install Minim alongside Twonky on your QNAP. As your music resides on the QNAP's hard drive(s), the Mac needn't run in order to play some tunes.
The album information is missing for precisely the reasons I gave above: it is not contained in the WAV files. If there are images for the artwork, they might be named in a non-coherent way so that Twonky currently does not "see" them.

Hope this helps you get started.

[simoncn]

I have moved this thread from the MinimStreamer section of the forum to the General section, as the question isn't about MinimStreamer.

[simoncn]

(05-05-2014 15:20)Walt61 Wrote:  I would also like advice on the possibility of creating playlists via minimserver.
I have read the accompanying literature with your product, and am beginning to think it is the way forward for me !

Welcome to the forum! The reply by uk75 has covered most of the points you have raised. I'll just add a comment about creating playlists.

MinimServer supports M3U playlists. These are plain text files with the extension .m3u and in their simplest form are just a list of filenames, such as

First Track.flac
Second Track.flac
etc.

To use this simple form, the playlist needs to be in the same folder as the files. If you want to put the playlist in a different folder, you can use relative or absolute paths for the files, such as

../First Album/First Track.flac
/share/Multimedia/Any Artist/First Album/First Track.flac

The above are just examples. If you use relative or absolute paths on your QNAP, it is important to obey Linux file naming conventions by using forward slashes to separate folder names and exact case sensitivity in folder names.

You can put the .m3u files anywhere in your library (under the contentDir folder) and MinimServer will find them.

[Walt61]

Thanks fellas, after much heartache and anguish, I see the end in sight, and it looks as though minimserver will be used ! Many thanks !
Walt