Mac and PC woes - AKICILJ

[lydy]

DDB has a server full of really good music, which I want to be able to play on my Mac. It is read-only, and I can get to it, just fine. If I click on a song, it plays through iTunes just fine. But I have absolutely no idea in the world how to build a play list or anything useful and clever like that. So, while I can play any individual song, I can't really set up a good listening environment. And I cannot for the life of me figure out how. Have had one hysterical crying fit so far, more on the way.

Anybody have any clues how to deal with networked music through iTunes, or a good mp3 player that works on Mac OSX? Winamp doesn't appear to have any real functionality, these days, for Mac, which is too bad, because it was a nice little thing, oh, ten years ago. It would be really really nice if I could find something that played ogg vorbis files, but I could live without the oggs if necessary.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Ask wema_way. They know this stuff.

K.

[guppiecat]

VLC or Vox might be what you're looking for. Both should be free, I think.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I had a weird problem with VLC on my last iteration of a Mac, probably partly due to the fact that I didn't really understand what it did, but it ended up causing weird problems with my ability to play DVDs. The most recent Vox seems to have a number of people who think it's incredibly buggy. The problem, of course, is that I am stupid in the ways of computers, and need something relatively easy to use and unlikely to fuck me up. VLC is, if I understand it, very flexible and powerful, which is probably how I ended up causing myself problems. I live in a walled garden partly because I need the goddamn walls. Unfortunately, just at the moment, I need a window. Sigh.

[laurel]

Sounds like you have a couple of different issues. Are you fine with iTunes as a music player in general (leaving aside access to DDB's music server for now)? Do you have an iTunes library you use with iTunes already? 'Cause if you're cool with and familiar with iTunes but just want to be able to get DDB's music into that system to put into playlists and/or your Library that should be doable, it's just a matter of if you want to actually import stuff into your library (onto your own system) or just access the music from DDB's server (more practical and likely I suspect).

If you aren't wild about iTunes in the first place or are willing to try something new, there are other options that maybe can access DDB's music and do things with it. I've not tried these myself (though Clementine has been on my "should try list" for ages):

I've heard good things about Clementine: http://www.clementine-player.org/ and Miro: http://www.getmiro.com/ and Nightingale.

It may be that if you try Clementine you'll love it and find a simple way to access DDB's music as well as any you have locally on your own machine.

You might try that route before trying other stuff, unless you really like iTunes in which case I think this is a fixable problem though it might involve using a bit of server software to feed DDB's music to your machine or you might have to import things. Though importing files into your own iTunes library should also be possible, but then you'd be duplicating them and taking up your own disk space.

What music software does DDB use to listen? Is there an OSX version of it? Other household members? Does anyone have any sort of music server running?

(In our household, I use Logitech's Squeezebox server to send music from both iTunes libraries and standard read-only folders like DDB's to various gadgets: http://www.mysqueezebox.com/download and have also used Plex to stream music as I'm already using it to distribute video all over the house.)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

So, once I found the correct version of Clementine, it seems to work just fine. It loaded the entire server as the library in almost no time. (The last time I tried it with iTunes, it was hours and hours, but that was at least a machine and and an OS ago).

I'll need to figure out the features, but it looks real good right now. Thank you.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Clementine continues to work beautifully. Thank you for the recommendation.

[laurel]

Hooray! That's good to hear. I should give it a go myself sooner rather than later-- I confess that I was in some part moved to like it based on the name and icon, not just recs for the software itself.

[laurel]

If you already have an iTunes Library locally on your Mac, you should be able to adjust your settings in iTunes (in advanced tab of preferences) so it says not to copy files to your mac when you add music to your library. (I'm guessing you don't have the space to make a local copy of DDB's files.)

Then if you have DDB's drive mounted, you should be able to go to the File menu and select "Add to Library" and then navigate to the folder on DDB's server that you want. To start with I'd just navigate to a folder for a specific artist or album and try adding it and see if it works. Since his files are read only and you have "don't copy" selected, when the files are added to iTunes it's basically just adding them to your local iTunes database but the pointers in that database point to DDB's read only files and the music itself isn't in your library. So later once they're in your database they'll only play when you're connected to DDB's server. Then you should be able to put songs in playlists etc. which data would be stored in your local iTunes library.

Basically, you need a local library for the database and playlist info (and any music you want stored locally) since you can't write to DDB's server & wouldn't want to clutter it up with iTunes shenanigans.

If for some reason you want multiple iTunes libraries, you can hit the Option key when you open iTunes to create a new library or select which library you want to open. Might be good to create an entirely new library by holding down the Option key when you select the iTunes icon to open it-- be sure to create the library in a local folder on your machine, then adjust settings in iTunes before Adding Music to your library.

Not sure I'm explaining this well. iTunes vexes me at times too.

[laurel]

Oh, if you have a drive or network folder mounted in such a way that it shows up on your desktop (maybe you navigated to it via "Connect to server" or "go to folder" or in Finder somehow), you can add it to your login items. Go to System Preferences & then Users and select yourself and then simply drag the desktop icon to "Login items" there. There are other ways to mount drives, but this is the easiest I guess.