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[DomCheetham]

I use Google Drive to store my music. I simply would like to use JRiver to access this library. Since it's over 50GB, Cloud music is very easy way to share music with my family and listen on the go with my iPhone.
I really was expecting JRiver to have this, but I cannot find a simple way to access the cloud.
JRiver does music very well, the WASAPI mode is excellent. The app is excellent, but sure fiddly if you want to do something specific, but it looks and sounds good.

So could this be done as a feature?

First post, so hello to the regulars. 

DomCheetham.

[blgentry]

MC is designed as a library management system and media player.  As far as I know, it's not really meant to be a "total cloud music solution".  It has JRemote for listening to music via a portable device over the network.

I suppose if Google Drive can be mounted locally as a volume that windows can see as a local drive, MC should be able to import music from it.  You'd have to test it though; I'm not 100% sure how it would work.

Brian.

[DomCheetham]

Thanks Brian, I guess I should be disappointed. If were going to in it, it would have been done already.

Well if the dev team are listening please develop cloud music streaming.

Dom.

 

[Weirdomusic]

I suppose if Google Drive can be mounted locally as a volume that windows can see as a local drive, MC should be able to import music from it.  You'd have to test it though; I'm not 100% sure how it would work.

You could use a tool like NetDrive to mount Google Drive (and various other cloud services) as a local drive. in theory such an option works fine with MC, but in reality results can be a bit 'shaky' (meaning that tracks will buffer or not load at all), depending on the performance of the cloud service. I've tested this with a variety of cloud services and in general it works fine with mp3s, but not with FLAC (which makes sense, since those files have to be decoded 'on the fly'). In the end the results were too unreliable for me: at times I could play mp3s from the cloud non-stop for an hour, and then all of a sudden all files would buffer for 5 (or 10 or 20...) seconds. If you want to give it a try: in my experience Google Drive and Dropbox are the best options. Amazon Cloud Drive was a disaster.

By the way, NetDrive also works with FTP and WebDav, so maybe that would be a solution for you if you have some sort of home server. I'm no expert on those protocols.

[AndrewFG]

^

Windows 10 has a cloud drive feature (called OneDrive) that appears to Windows applications as a regular UNC network share drive. I have not tested it myself, but I see no reason why it should not work with MC, however I would also expect it to potentially be hampered by latency issues on hi-res tracks. EDIT: I just Googled OneDrive and I see that it also keeps a local cache copy of the file on the PC (thus eliminating latency issues).

Furthermore my employer uses a cloud drive system called Syncplicity so that its peoples' personal folders are stored on a cloud facility accessible from any number of multiple users devices. On the Windows OS the Syncplicity cloud files show up in the folder D:\syncplicity\<UserName>\ so any normal Windows application can access it like a regular folder. I mention this because I think (as the name Syncplicity implies), it does cache files locally (in some kind of "magic" hidden manner) on the PC hard drive, so that latency errors are reduced on frequently used files.

[DomCheetham]

Thanks for the reply's, nice to know you are here and listening.

[blgentry]

I'm kind of confused by your intended use.  If you use google drive for your music isn't there some sort of integrated player and/or Google Music service that works with this?

MC is really intended for the music collector.  Someone that wants their own collection, curated how they want it, and stored locally.  It's really not designed to be a streaming music solution.  Music streaming customers don't typically care about the quality or source of their music as much as music collectors.  I'm speaking in general terms; there are exceptions.

If you are a streaming guy, what's the appeal of MC?

Brian.

[DomCheetham]

Not big reasons.

First, I use a high end HiFi. £2000 worth minus the computer. I just bought the Dynaudio Emit M20 speakers. So high quality output like WASAPI is important. Groove Music Player is fine but only streams from OneDrive and no WASAPI of course.

Second, I got an iPhone which streams Google Drive with an app called Cloud Indeed and I use the cheap but still cracking AKG 451's. I also listen and share music with my brother and father. My brother creates music.

Your right, it's not important that I use J River. I just would like to store hi res music on Google Drive and play it every where I go. I am looking at apps that stream music on windows.

Since I have J River, just thought I would voice my request.

Cheers.

 

[Weirdomusic]

MC is really intended for the music collector.  Someone that wants their own collection, curated how they want it, and stored locally. 

I want to own my collection and I want to curate it how I want it, but in these times of cloud computing it would be great if I wouldn't have to buy a couple of new hard drives every year to store the ever growing collection of music, movies, tv shows, games, comics, etc. :-)
So, for me personally it's not about streaming, it's a space / convenience issue.

[Weirdomusic]

Windows 10 has a cloud drive feature (called OneDrive) that appears to Windows applications as a regular UNC network share drive.

That's not something that OneDrive does natively, you still have to use tools to mount it as a drive if you only want to store your content in the cloud and not store it locally (which is the whole point).

Oh, and I tested OneDrive for audio and video streaming too, and it was very, very unreliable.

[RoderickGI]

Some MC features such as Cover Art management, and particlularly Audio Analysis, would be a nightmare if the music was solely stored on a Cloud service. Audio Analysis needs to read the whole file to work out volume levels and so on. That means downloading every file added to the MC library to analsye it, after you have just uploaded it to the Cloud, and then when you play it, download it again.

I think the simpler solution is to store music locally. Disk space is cheap, and much more cost effective than Cloud storage space. We are talking Terabytes of local storage, but only Gigabytes of Cloud storage. Do all maintenance on MC locally, and then make MC available via the web, for listening on the go. It only requires opening a port in your router, then port forwarding to the appropriate MC Server PC to work, and then a Client that understands MC, or DLNA, to play the tunes. Anybody you give access to can play your music.

Much more sensible for a large collection. The only caveat is that you need a reliable internet connection at home, with a decent upload speed. But if you can't meet that requirement MC gives you the option to synchronise a subset of your collection to a portable device, for music on the go. You could even synchronise a subset of your library to a Cloud service, after analysis and with its Cover Art, plus any DSP if required, if you wanted some music in the Cloud to play elsewhere.

[eljr]

Oh, and I tested OneDrive for audio and video streaming too, and it was very, very unreliable.

?


I have never had an issue. Ever. It works great 100%

What the OP wants to do is exactly what I was going to do. I intend to use onedrive. What I do have now and use several times a day I use  stream through windows media center. Why would a different media center make a difference?

I do not understand why the library being in a cloud (a far off hard drive) is any different than being on a closer by hard drive that you own???

[RoderickGI]

I do not understand why the library being in a cloud (a far off hard drive) is any different than being on a closer by hard drive that you own???

I can believe that, sadly. You must have perfect internet; 100% reliable and very fast.

People would consider a 100 Mbps internet service fast. A local hard disk works at around 100 MB/second. When MC is doing all the activities I listed above, Cover Art, Audio Analysis, tagging, etc., then you are relying on a service that is probably eight times slower than local drives, at best. Add on top of that latency of your internet connection, if any, and you could have an unsatisfactory listening experience.

As AndrewFG noted, OneDrive does use a local cache, if you tell it/allow it to, but if all media files are cached locally, you still need the storage space locally, and you have another layer of software below MC that is redirecting MC to look at the cache instead of the OneDrive location on line. Essentially, you have a backup of your media files online on OneDrive, but that is all you have achieved. If that is all you want, better to set up all your media files locally as you wish, and then tell OneDrive to backup those files. OneDrive will then keep the files synchronised so you always have an up to date backup. Then if you wished you could stream individual files from OneDrive on demand to any player, when you are out and about.

In summary, streaming a file from OneDrive to a local player is one thing. Using OneDrive to store all your media files for use with MC is quite different.