Anyone ever use a NAS as a Music Streamer?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I picked up a like new Netgear NAS the other day and it works just fine. It also has four WD Black IT Grade drives in it which is really why I bought it, figured if the ANS wouldn't work that I wold use an old workstation with those 4 drives to be the streamer.. I figured I would try to use the NAS as the streamer into my computers and if that could not work, then I would use the four WD drives to build a music and videl streamer out of an old work station. Anyway, I thought I;d ask if anyone here has ever built a music streamer out of a NAS before? I use JRiver on my computers, so it needs to work with that. Any advice is appreciated! Never used a NAS before...

Mark

[Gordon McLeod]

I have a QNAP rack mount nas and it has a media player in it

[Frank Cox]

I have a qnap stand-alone (not rack mount) nas and it has a media player of some kind in it too. I just use that machine for a nfs fileserver, though, so I've never actually used the player stuff and can't comment on how well it may or may not work. The nfs part works fine.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I don't know what you consider to be a "streamer"... a NAS is simply a networked storage device. Most NASes support NFS (Linux and Unix) and SMB (Windows) shares, some support other protocols, like HTTP and FTP. If you're using JRiver on a Mac, just make sure you mount the share with the music files via either NFS or SMB on your Mac and let JRiver work from there...

For anything that doesn't require "enterprise grade" availability, I've been using Synology for a while now as my go-to NAS brand and it works pretty nice. Synology even has a "web player" for files containing music and it wouldn't surprise me if recent QNAP software does have the same.

I've been using Kodi in combination with Synology NFS for a while now, to access my old, digitized media libraries and it offers all kinds of automatic media-indexing options for movies, TV shows and also old-school CDs, ripped a few years ago. Kodi is sometimes seen as some kind of evil bootleg software, but in reality, it's one of the better and more customizable mediacenters out there, that's why it also is being abused by the bootlegging mobsters.

[Leo Enticknap]

I have a Buffalo LS421DE (two-drive) NAS, with 2 x 6TB drives in it as a RAID1, and with the DLNA function enabled, my Roku TV picks it up as a streaming source to play video files. Same thing for my AV receiver and audio files, though I almost never listen to digital audio media. This is all wired; don't know how reliable the video would be relying on wifi.

[Ed Gordon]

I picked up a like new Netgear NAS the other day and it works just fine. It also has four WD Black IT Grade drives in it which is really why I bought it, figured if the ANS wouldn't work that I wold use an old workstation with those 4 drives to be the streamer.. I figured I would try to use the NAS as the streamer into my computers and if that could not work, then I would use the four WD drives to build a music and videl streamer out of an old work station. Anyway, I thought I;d ask if anyone here has ever built a music streamer out of a NAS before? I use JRiver on my computers, so it needs to work with that. Any advice is appreciated! Never used a NAS before...

Mark

Mark, I have been using JRiver with a Synology NAS for a few years now, and it works quite well. JRiver is smart enough to recognize if the NAS is in sleep mode and wake it up and displays a "spinning up drive" message. I don't really use Synology apps, except for email so that I get notices about errors, or updates that are ready to apply to the NAS.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I am not that familiar yet with how this box works. I had to do a factory reset to be able to get into it and then assign it a static IP. I also prefer not to use this through a router., just on a local network. It does appear on my computers network list of things, but so far I have not figured out how to integrate JRiver into it. Drag and drop or Copy-paste file transfer works to get music files into it, but that's obviously not what is intended. Since JRiver also needs metadata to work properly, I will have to investigate more into How JRiver can move the library into the NAS.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Are you using Mac Or Windows? Either way, you should mount the share as a permanent share, so it always mounts when you login. Then you can copy the files to the share. Once you're done, you should be able to add those files to the media library of JRiver.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Am using my old Win 7 Workstation. All the music files reside on a Win 10 machine and on a 2 TB backup disk at the moment...

[Ed Gordon]

As Marcel said, you need to map the shared NAS folder to a Windows drive (l use W: for instance). You can just copy all the media files and their associated jpg and xml files to your new NAS drive and then run import in JRiver. JRiver import will then update the xml files with the new location.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

As Marcel said, you need to map the shared NAS folder to a Windows drive (l use W: for instance). You can just copy all the media files and their associated jpg and xml files to your new NAS drive and then run import in JRiver. JRiver import will then update the xml files with the new location.

Yep, got it working that way. I copied a few files over then let JRiver import them after mapping to the folder I created in the NAS just for JRiver. Now just waiting on almost a TB of CD audio to copy over to the NAS. Then I can run import again and I should have it. I also have about 35K images I am going to do a similar thing with. But first need to explore apps for filing and viewing images. Once I have the audio and images all on this thing I will beck it all up to some cloud some where.

Thanks for everyone's help and suggestions....!!

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Actually just mapped it to the NAS > JRiver folder I created for the music data. Ran Auto-Import and bam, there it all was..