You've got a lot of questions below. I'm going to try to answer what I can, but we might want to break some of these out into their own threads if they require further discussion.
I'm happy to try to help you. But when you have a lot of different questions in one thread, sometimes they get lost, or the people helping get over whelmed with so much to analyze at one time that they don't give effective help. I'm speaking for myself here.
On to the questions...
1. Clicking sounds in place of music when playing through DLNA on the D7050 - I currently set my sound preferences on my mac to output to the D7050 (connected via ethernet directly to the router) using Airplay. When I try to switch to DLNA (after disabling airplay and choosing internal speakers instead of the D7050) and choose the D7050 as the zone to play from in MC, i only get weird clicking sounds through the speakers. Also, my control options (play, pause etc) don't seem to work when this is happening and I have to either close MC completely or shut down the amp.
I remember another person here with the same device having problems with it and DLNA. In the thread he opened, I asked if he would try connecting to the D7050 via USB or coaxial or optical digital. He refused and never followed up with any additional information. If you want to see the thread with a lot of problem reports from him, it's here:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=105251.0I'm not sure if the D7050 can be made to work correctly with MC or not. It might work great. But it might be worth a try to connect to it directly with USB or coax as a test.
2. Can't connect to the Media Server remotely using both JRemote and Webgizmo - I get a timed out error when trying to remotely connect to the server. [...] I intend to move my files to an always-on HTPC soon and stream my rather, difficult-to-find collection of music to my phone OTG.
So you mean using JRemote from outside your home network then right? I know people do this all the time, but I haven't done it myself. I prefer to have real local copies of my media on my devices. Anyway, I think you're on to something opening the MC Media Network port (52199); that's how MC communicates. I would probably open a thread about this in the Media Network forum where it will get attention from people that are very familiar with that.
3. Unable to install plugins - I started off with 22.0.22 and soon realized that I was unable to install plugins. When clicking the option to install plugins either from the main options window or the DSP Studio window, nothing happened. No pop-ups and no errors whatsoever.
I'm unsure what the status of this is. I can barely find any VST plugins that will install in MC. In fact, I can only think of one that I have made work and I have it installed now. The problem is, the current version of MC (22.0.30) will NOT uninstall this plugin. So I can't test installation functionality because I can't find any VSTs that are compatible with MC.
I would open a separate thread on this here in the MC22 for Mac forum.
1. When you say MC doesn't support Airplay, you're merely referring to the ability to stream directly from MC to airplay devices right?. Doing what I'm doing (Setting sound preferences in Mac to play through my airplay enabled devices should be just fine right?
I do not know. I know direct AirPlay integration definitely isn't included. Using AirPlay via a system device is something I have not tested. I have seen no commentary from the JRiver staff on this. So it's hard to say what should work because you have a (possibly) misbehaving device and I have no AirPlay to test with.
Sorry.
2. I intend to setup multi-room audio with a raspberry pi 3 or odroid C2. Is there a guide on how I can sync audio to multiple devices from JRiver running on a MAC?. Will these devices show up under Player--->Zone which I can then use to "Link" in MC to stream in sync?. Is that how it works?
This will never work for you with audio in sync. Network devices will not maintain sync between each other. They will always be out of time in some way. You can certainly Zone Link any Zones that JRiver has shown in the tree. You can even use the Zone Link Timing tool to adjust timing between zones. But for network devices this is a waste of time because the timing drifts and will not stay in sync for long at all.
For locally connected devices, it doesn't even work that well in my experience. Maybe I should test again, as Matt says he has very good sync with his local devices.
I'm told that a multi-channel sound device will maintain perfect sync because one device has one clock that's shared among all channels. If you want perfectly in sync audio, I advise a multi-channel sound device and running wires to your destinations. Or use another technology like Air Foil, which I believe allows you to send any kind of Mac audio to AirPlay devices *and* let's you link multiple AirPlay devices together in sync.
I've typed this all pretty fast and I'm realizing that my tone probably isn't all that positive. Don't be discouraged; I'm just trying to efficiently tell you what I know about all of your questions. Ask more if you'd like; open new threads as appropriate.
Welcome to MC. I think you'll end up really liking it if we can get you over your initial hurdles.
Brian.