Wanted: A Good UPnP Music Server
I’m looking for a good UPnP music server. So far, the closest I’ve found to meeting my needs is Nero MediaHome, but it’s far from perfect. Just last night I installed Yahoo Music Engine, with their UPnP plug-in. I left it cataloguing and went to bed around midnight. This morning, I checked it out (another reject), and then uninstalled it.
What I want is something that:
- Runs as a Windows service. It must not be a requirement that a specific person be logged into the PC. Nor can it be a requirement that a specific media player application (like Windows Media, or Yahoo Media) be running in order to power my media devices around the house.
- Uses a database to store track information. It must not reload all the track information from scratch when it starts.
- Collects and represents all the tracks I have on the network as a single music collection. It must not require that I know which server has which tracks, and whether or not that particular server is online. It would be really nice if the media server could use the "wake on network activity" feature that most PC’s support in order to wake the server up if the music was offline.
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Can handle a large number of tracks. Most of the servers I’ve seen are optimized for a few hundred, or maybe a couple of thousand. The design point seems to be "how many tracks could you fit on an iPOD". I’m pushing 10,000 at the moment. Nero Mediahome takes over 30 minutes to load the track list each time it starts, for example. The brain dead Netgear media server that came with my MP-101 devices takes 1.5 days to recatalog the collection when I add a new track.
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Exposes a rich set of features to the UPnP media end-point device. A few that I am looking for right now include playlists, play by genre / artist / album / year / mood, internet radio.
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Acceptable interaction speed with my MP-101 devices. Some of these servers can take 30 or 40 seconds to respond to a request. The designers seem to have forgotten that these things are consumer electronics devices.
What have I tried so far?
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Twonkyvision - rejected because of an incomprehensible setup / user guide, impossible to use UI, and inadequate feature support.
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Windows Media Connect - doesn’t catalog files except on the local PC. Most of mine are located on a Request Audio ARQ-1 Pro media server. Windows Media Connect doesn’t run as a server either.
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Windows Media with the On2Share UPnP plug-in - Doesn’t run as a server, and requires Windows Media player to be running at all times. Lousy feature support on the end-point device.
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Yahoo Music Engine with the UPnP plug-in - Ditto.
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Netgear MP-101 Media Server - terrible UI, no database, slow slow slow. Good feature support though, except no support for playlists.
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Nero Mediahome - This thing is a major CPU hog. At random times it pushes my CPU to 95% capacity, and pegs it there for 30 minutes or more. Poor feature support. Slow startup. Slow interaction with the music player device.
My ideal scenario would be for the good folks at Request Audio to support this stuff natively on the ARQ-1.
Does anyone out there have any other suggestions?
