Music library / manager with server-client support?
There's a lot of "media library" managers and players out there, e.g.
Windows Media Player
Apple iTunes
MediaMonkey
DoubleTwist
...etc.
They all seem to have one thing in common - they're designed to be used on a single PC, where the music collection is stored locally on the hard drive.
Sure, some of them can be bludgeoned into working with music over the network, but it is always slow, flaky, and requires special configuration and tweaking to make it work. Concurrently accessing the same database from multiple computer usually results in a corrupted database after a while.
Is there a media library / music management program that is designed from the ground up to have a server component (which handles the database and storage), and a client (which runs on the PC and actually plays the music) out there?
Something that uses a REAL database technology that is designed for concurrent access from several different computers at once?
Something which maybe even has a halfway decent smartphone app to access the same database from your phone over the Internet as well? (Or maybe that's asking too much...)
I'm sure there are lots of small projects out there that do this. A quick googling found me Helium Music Manager, but is there anything out there that is big, mature, established and actually works?
Windows Media Player
Apple iTunes
MediaMonkey
DoubleTwist
...etc.
They all seem to have one thing in common - they're designed to be used on a single PC, where the music collection is stored locally on the hard drive.
Sure, some of them can be bludgeoned into working with music over the network, but it is always slow, flaky, and requires special configuration and tweaking to make it work. Concurrently accessing the same database from multiple computer usually results in a corrupted database after a while.
Is there a media library / music management program that is designed from the ground up to have a server component (which handles the database and storage), and a client (which runs on the PC and actually plays the music) out there?
Something that uses a REAL database technology that is designed for concurrent access from several different computers at once?
Something which maybe even has a halfway decent smartphone app to access the same database from your phone over the Internet as well? (Or maybe that's asking too much...)
I'm sure there are lots of small projects out there that do this. A quick googling found me Helium Music Manager, but is there anything out there that is big, mature, established and actually works?
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Actually nevermind, the more I use Plex the more I realize it is frickin awesome.
The other alternative might be XBMC, which is what Plex is based off of, but it's kindof like deciding to use Debian instead of Ubuntu. You could.... but the latter is a lot more polished and has a lot of the beginner's issues resolved already.
Thank you for the tip lherrou!
The other alternative might be XBMC, which is what Plex is based off of, but it's kindof like deciding to use Debian instead of Ubuntu. You could.... but the latter is a lot more polished and has a lot of the beginner's issues resolved already.
Thank you for the tip lherrou!
Glad to be of help :)
ASKER
I'll look more into Plex. I played with it a few years ago and didn't get very far, but my needs were different back then and I suppose it changes and improves every day.
NAS typically implement some form of DLNA, which is useful, but I'm looking for something a fair bit more sophisticated than that.
..... is there anything else anyone can think of?