Sorry, I can't really help as I have never used MC in that way. You might want to consider importing just a few songs into MC to try it out as the server to see if you get better results and might like more control over the conversion, etc.
OK, I made some progress. I created a new library and imported my full Server library. This worked well - I hadn't realized that "Import" in MC just creates a database of your actual files. In other players, import often means physically creating/copying files in a directory on your local PC. The newly created library had just one entry per file/song finally (instead of 6) and in fact I am now able to play those wma lossless files on the Soundbridge. It doesn't work all that eloquently - the first time you send files to the Soundbridge player, it skips the first 3 or 4 songs before finally starting to play. Once that happens, it seems to allow consistent playback until the server disconnects for some reason. Finally, the biggest disappointment was in testing my ultimate objective of linking the two Soundbridge zones, this performed quite poorly. My experience was large delays between zones, and the adjustment control did little or nothing to rectify the delay. Unfortunately that is a dealbreaker for using MC for this purpose. I had read performance for dlna devices on MC was not great but I didn't expect it to be unusable. As I had mentioned previously, I still use a dated version of Cidero software to link and play music simultaneously through both Soundbridges. By comparison Cidero works very well, with near perfect synchronization. It does make me wonder why JRiver couldn't do a better job here. To be fair, the Cidero developer set out to provide this functionality on Soundbridges, and it only works well when your Soundbridges are the same model; on the other hand I'm pretty sure it was written by a single person! One could argue that the real value of MC is not as a controller, but why then go to all the effort of creating dlna functionality and servers and zones and links if the result is so poor?
At some point I may make use of MC as a standalone audio player. I like the ability to control the sound path. I was also intrigued by the Theater mode. Maybe if MC eventually supports cablecard tuners, it could be a good replacement for Windows Media Center. A few other thoughts from what ended up being an informal evaluation:
- generally the player is quite complex, with a lot of options and ways of configuring things, particuarly when you turn on the Media Network functionality. It creates servers which seems weird in an environment that as it turns out can't connect to external dlna servers (see below). They do at least show up on your client with a recognizable name so that part is good. MC discovers dlna clients, but they don't do anything unless you associate a dlna server with them. Or do they ... ? Hard to know because there is virtually no documentation on the purpose and functionality of these constructs. And good luck figuring out what the advance options do for a server.
- further, MC also discovers dlna servers (like my home server based wmc collection), but even though it looks exactly like a Server source looks like on a client/render, it is not actally a streaming source. Turns out it is a library, but the library doesn't do anything ... unless you realize that it really then starts to autoimport all the file information from your server. So it really isn't a dlna server at all anymore, it is a MC library. But the autoimporting, at least for Microsoft wmc server, doesn't work because it in fact imports 6 different file versions of the same song. Why 6? And those imports only work with the local player, not with a dlna zone (I achieved my success above in the end by ignoring this auto-discovered library and instead creating a new library and then importing my Server collection by specifying the explicit destination folders).
- it would be really helpful if there was better documentation on libraries, importing, the different dlna configuration options etc. I would guess that there are probably only a handful of basic setups - ways in which 99% of people would use MC functions in their networked environment. Why not document these with actual examples of how they work: as a standalone music player, as a multiPC synced arrangement, as a Server, as a controller, as a renderer etc.
rknox
Author
Topic: Media Network setup with Soundbridge and wma lossless - Help! (Read 2939 times)