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[roycymru]

Hi

I can only seem to find one post on this which seemed very complicated and involved setting up a pdeudo hand held device. This seems unecessarily complicated. Therefore I would be very grateful for advice. I have no pre-existing music management software or playlists set up and all I have done so far is rip all my CDs as FLAC files onto a NAS drive which is linked to my Sonos system.

I now want to use Media Centre (assuming it can do this) to manage the files directly on my NAS drive, re-tag if necessary and create play lists etc that Sonos will automatically pickup. Can someone please give me a step by step guide on how to do this and also highlight anything I need to take particular note of.

Thank you

[csimon]

I assume you've already got Sonos set up to browse and play the music via its own system and you just want to use JRiver to tag the collection properly and create playlists which can be used by Sonos?

First of all you need to import your music into the JRiver library.  See http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Import for detailed help, but basically what you do is pont JRiver to the network place where your music is stored.

When your files have been imported, you can browse the library in JRiver and edit the tags for individual files or in bulk.  See http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/File_Properties_%28tags%29. The import process can actually automatically tag obvious things for you so you might not need to do any manual tagging afterwards.

You may need to "customise the views" (http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/View_Schemes) to be able to browse your collection in the way you want to so that you can find things easily, but the default views should get you started.

You can easily create playlists in JRiver and add tracks to them, but I'm not sure how these can be "exported" to the Sonos system.  Perhaps someone with more knowledge of Sonos can help.

The other slight issue is that I'm not sure how flexible FLAC tagging is and what sort of tags you can put in these files, and whether Sonos can read them.

Is this the sort of information you're looking for and do you want anything expanding on?

Note that JRiver is a very powerful program and just using it for tagging is a bit of overkill!  There may be other programs that are deidcated to tagging and therefore more straightforward to use for this purpose.

However, you could also use JRiver as a uPnP/DLNA server which, I think, Sonos is able to use insetad of its own system. In this way at least, Playlists that are set up in JRiver will definitely appear in Sonos.

PS. I'm a Cymro too!

[JimH]

cymru or cymro is a person from Wales, I think.  I had to go to Google.

Thanks for helping, csimon.

[roycymru]

Diolch yn fawr! (regretably probably the limit of my Welsh speaking capabilities).

Thanks for you detailed, comprehensive and very useful reply. I will read through in more detail, including the links at the weekend. You are right in your assumption as to how I have set up the system so far. A couple of follow on questions:

My FLAC files already have comprehensive tagging (From dBpoweramp) so I would not want MC to automatically to do anything else to the tagging on the initial import but just want to sort of some manually afterwards. I presume it is easy to stop MC from trying to add any additional tagging during import?

Sonos says it is compatible with playlists in the M3U, WPL and PLS format. Do you know the format of MC playlists and/or is there the ability to "Save As" a MC playlist in one of the appropriate formats

Does MC easily and automatically identify and remove any duplicated from a playlist?

Thanks again

[csimon]

Yes, the automatic tagging on import is an option.

As far as playlists go, I haven't actually exported any playlists myself to use them with another application, but in MC there is indeed an option when you right-click on a playlist to export it, and you get a dialog box with lots of different options, such as:

Store paths relative to playlist location (I guess you'd also have to make sure the pathnames are accessible from Sonos)
MPL
HTML
Delimited text file
ASX
M3U (simple)
M3U (extended)
M3U8

See http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Export_Playlists

[roycymru]

Bore da. Thanks again for your prompt reply.

One further question, the way I have set things us so far is to rip my CDs onto a "standard" external drive and then copy from here to my NAS drive, thus providing me with an backup. When I get JMRC up and going I plan to just import into JMRC from my NAS drive (which I presume will be just a matter of importing and directing it to my SonosMusic folder on my NAS drive?). However when I add further rips to the NAS drive how do I get JMRC to update its database, do I have to run another process or does it do it automatically? I am resuming I don't have to rerun the whole Import process every time I add something to my music collection?

[csimon]

There is a facility int he Import dialog to set up an Auto Import, i.e. a series of watched folders where new files will automatically be imported.

[thurston]

I also have sonos and just wanted to say a quick thanks for your post.  It's good to have more information for setting up the two programs to play with each other.

[Sapper6]

Where does MC stores files?  I am trying to point Sonos there using the MENU-MUSIC-SET UP MUSIC LIBRARY - ADD A SHARE

Right now Sonos is set up to look for Itunes at C:\iTunes
and other music at C:\Users\Bill\Music\Itunes\iTunes Media\Music

How do I get the MC files added to Sonos?

[txgardener]

Where does MC stores files?  I am trying to point Sonos there using the MENU-MUSIC-SET UP MUSIC LIBRARY - ADD A SHARE

Right now Sonos is set up to look for Itunes at C:\iTunes
and other music at C:\Users\Bill\Music\Itunes\iTunes Media\Music

How do I get the MC files added to Sonos?

I did this by creating a share of the NAS music folder named 'musicshare' then added it to Sonos as '\\NASname\musicshare'.  I also export .m3u playlists from MC to this same folder.  They then appear in the Sonos library and work well.  Now if I could just get the volumes normalized through gain values, I'd be real happy.