To provide some context, I am retired for a number of years and until just over a month ago my exposure to digital music was playing CDs, and listening to a DAB radio. I decided it would be beneficial to store my CDs on a hard drive as I am finding it more difficult to keep moving around to select them and insert in CD player. So in the last few weeks I have got to grips with setting up a Synology NAS, understanding CD Ripper to transfer the CDs to the NAS, and setting up Asset UPnP on the NAS. I have also purchased a CXNv2 streamer and am using StreamMagic on an iPad to control it.
Having spent hours scouring the forums etc trying to find answers to my many questions, I am stuck on one particular subject, which is playlists. While I have made some progress I find that a lot of the information is aimed at folks with more technical knowledge and understanding of the digital music environment.
Having never used a playlist before, I am assuming that by using them I would be able to select tracks from various albums and have them automatically play in the order that they appear in the playlist. If that is the case, then I am failing to achieve this.
I noted that the playlist file type should be .m3u and I saved a playlist file in this format using Windows Media Player. However the contents of this were gobbledegook compared to the plain text file I was expecting, and it didn't work in StreamMagic.
I then found a DSP option in CD Ripper called Playlist Writer so I tried that. It created a .m3u file in the expected format i.e. plain text, although it used a disk drive designator for the file path. More research identified that I needed to change this for each track e.g.
from M:\Beach Boys, The\The Sound of Summer\....
to /volume1/music/Beach Boys, The/The Sound of Summer/....
Does this suggest there is something setup incorrectly in my CD Ripper/Asset configuration? I don't really understand the purpose of this DSP - why create a playlist of just the album being ripped?
Anyway, this playlist was recognised by StreamMagic and I could see the tracks in it. The problem is that I can't see any way to play it as a playlist. Again, I am assuming that it should just play all the way through automatically, otherwise I don't see the advantage. All I can do in StreamMagic though is select each track and add it to the queue, which defeats the purpose if my assumption is correct.
I have asked Cambridge Audio about this and their response was "Is the .m3u file in the same folder as the tracks to which it relates?". I couldn't reconcile this question with how I thought a playlist would work so I am really hoping that someone can point me in the right direction here, or at the very least confirm (or not) my assumptions about how this should work.
Thanks.