Finally a perfect DLNA music server. Thank you!

[samundsen]

I have no problems, issues or questions. This is just a thank you note for providing the best DLNA music streaming server on the market.

About a week ago I got a new AV receiver, a Yamaha RX-V2065 with DLNA capabilities. I also have both a Windows Home Server (HP MediaSmart) and a Infrant/Netgear ReadyNAS box, both provides different kinds of streaming services built-in. They ALL suck, and I was ready to give up.

Most of my music is ripped in lossless WMA, which the receiver does not support, so I needed either on-the-fly transcoding, or convert all my WMAs to FLAC, which the receiver does support. I also prefer to browse my music using Album Artist -> Album, or Genre -> Album Artist -> Album.

I tried ReadyDLNA on the ReadyNAS box. It does not transcode, but plays FLAC. No Album Artist tag, and navigation was terrible.

Under WHS I tried:

Window Media Connect - but no FLAC, no transcoding from lossless WMA to Wave. Terrible navigation.

Twonky - Decent navigation, supported transcoding and FLAC, but transcoding was a MAJOR CPU hog and slow as molasses.

Mezzmo - Will transcode, supports FLAC and WMA, but terrible navigation. No Album Artist tag support.

TVersity - ALMOST. Decent navigation, supported album artist, FLAC, transcoding. However, there appear to be a bug in FLAC support of album artist tag, it wouldn't read it. Worked fine with the tag in MP3 and WMA files, just not FLAC (other complaints about this on their forums). Also, I could not get WMA transcoding to work at all.

Being a long time dbPowerAMP user I figured maybe I could use the tag editor to figure out something about the album artist tag problem with FLAC in TVersity, which is when I happened to see something called Asset UPnP DLNA Audio Server. I had no idea you had this and I was intrigued, so I downloaded and installed the WHS version, and was FLOORED at how well it performed.

Asset UPnP does EVERYTHING I wanted. Not only FULL functioning support for Album Artist, but completely configurable navigation trees. I was able to configure it exactly how I wanted. Effortless on-the-fly transcoding of lossless WMA to WAVE with very low CPU utilization and memory usage. Integration into the WHS console. I'm streaming music right now and it's transcoding on the server while the server happen to be running backups, but I notice no hiccups or delays in the music at all.

I don't need the Internet Radio feature as the receiver has excellent support for that built-in, but I'll be paying for Asset anyways. dbPowerAMP has always served me well, and it appears Asset will do the same.

[mezzmo]

Re: Finally a perfect DLNA music server. Thank you!

Mezzmo - Will transcode, supports FLAC and WMA, but terrible navigation. No Album Artist tag support.

Hi,

I just wanted to note that Mezzmo has support for Album Artist tag playlists - you can use the Create Active Playlist and choose any order of the supported tags (Artist, Album, Genre, Year, File Type) to create a hierarchy in any way you wish.

Dennis

[samundsen]

Re: Finally a perfect DLNA music server. Thank you!

Hi,

I just wanted to note that Mezzmo has support for Album Artist tag playlists - you can use the Create Active Playlist and choose any order of the supported tags (Artist, Album, Genre, Year, File Type) to create a hierarchy in any way you wish.

Dennis

Ok, noted, but it sure wasn't intuitive like it is in Asset UPnP. When I used the Mezzmo software I saw that I could modify the hierarchy, but it appeared to be for the management software only, none of the changes were actually reflected in the DLNA server. I looked through your FAQs, forums and general web pages, but couldn't find any info on how to do what I wanted.

When I do the same thing in Asset UPnP, any change I make directly in the hierarchy is immediately visible through the server.

In fact, Asset has shown me some ways to organize I hadn't considered. Here is how I ended up organizing my menus:

Album Artist

[A-Z]

Album

Album

Album

[A-Z]

Genre

Album Artist

[A-Z]

Album

Album

Album

[A-Z]

This lets me browse Album Artists either by full list or through letter grouping, and at each level see the albums under the artist selected.

It's so flexible and easy to do, I'm still experimenting with which structures I like best. I recently found the browse by Compilation, which is nice.

It's certainly possible that some of the other servers can do similar things, but it wasn't obvious to me how.