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Looking for an I-Pad front end for a music player.

chrisccs

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Hi,

I’m looking for an I-Pad front end for a music player.
Let me explain:
I wish to be able from my I-Pad to walk through all the covers of my music albums and be able to add individual tracks to a currently playing queue.
Simple right?
Wait…
  • All my music files sits on a NAS (QNAP TS859 Pro+)
  • I’m a PC guy, so the words Mac, ITunes, apple TV and all related crap is to be banned from any suggestion:rolleyes:
    I-tunes isn’t able to cope with the size of my music collection (200000 tracks) Last time I tried it took 15 days to create the library and then it crashed and lost all information including all apps for my I-Phone, I-pad and I-pod!
    I don’t want to start with a Mac because eventually I will have to use ITunes (see previous line)
  • I’m ready to use either a PC software proposing the I-Pad as a controller or any purposely build player assuming it can handle my ever growing music collection. This exclude Sonos (which on paper looks like THE solution) as to spare two and an half dollars those people lack the necessary memory to cope with my collection (limit of 65000 files)
  • I want to be able to see the artwork of my albums !!! I didn’t spend years setting up a clean library with all the artwork to end up in front of a list of names !
  • However I want a search tool allowing me to type any word and have a display of results of any tag field (folder name would be a cherry on the cake, kid music being the name of a folder, not the content of a tag).
  • I want to be able to do an update of the data base used by the interface after I performed some changes on file in the NAS (modification of tags, addition of artwork of albums)
  • I want to be able to search my music collection without interrupting the playing queue
  • I want to be able to add files (or albums) to this queue.
  • I want to be able to view the queue and modify the way it is playing (repeat, random,…)
  • I want to be able to do all this from the I-Pad, to play music, it is not necessary to have the TV on (however some psychedelic image on a screen would be an interesting feature)
  • I already have a real cool solution to deal with video files, thank you. (it doesn’t handle audio though)
  • Ah , and Yes, I want the music to come out of my BIG speakers, not from the I-pad!
Has anyone a good (and cheap) suggestion based onto experience?

Thank you for your help

Christian
 

elking98

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Alternatives to iTunes that work on PC

I know a few programs like iTunes but the best is MediaMonkey. It works for PC, and has basically the same functions as iTunes but it supports huge music libraries: mediamonkey.com
You should check it out! Other programs include: Songbird, CopyTrans Manager and Foobar 2000. The best is media monkey though.
 

wingzfan61

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I do exactly what you want especially for big parties. I'll explain my setup quickly then tell you how I do it.

3 rooms in the house running pc's, any will do but I run htpc's
All 3 have shareport4w to enable AirPlay
Music server/nas with roughly 21,000 songs running windows 7

This allows me to play the same song simultaneously throughout the house during parties.

Now for whatever reason you say iTunes doesn't work but I have all my music loaded on the windows 7 machine in iTunes. Then from my iPad I run the iTunes remote app and control a running playlist with album art and tell it what speakers to play on. I never touch my iTunes machine. I can add music to the playlist without interrupting the current song just like you want.

My suggestion for ease of use is to figure out why iTunes crashed but if you want another option your gonna have to use something like audio galaxy to host your music and send it either via Bluetooth or AirPlay to your existing computer. If you want you can buy a griffin bluetooth dongle and plug it directly into your receiver and send anything you want to the receiver.


Best, most feature friendly option is iTunes and iOS. And there's no reason 20,000 songs shouldn't load in iTunes without crashing the machine.
 
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chrisccs

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The best is media monkey though.

elking98 thank you! After visiting media monkey's website I was in doubt. The features are great but it is just another winamp which is my favorite player since day 1. So I had to pay a little more attention to the I-Pad front end part and the most interesting I found was Monkeymote that does work with ....Winamp !!!
It is a bit late to play now, but first thing tomorrow morning is to install all this and see what it is able to do.

Again thanks a lot for your input.

Christian
 
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chrisccs

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And there's no reason 20,000 songs shouldn't load in iTunes without crashing the machine.

wingzfan61, thanks for your input. The beginning of your answer was really promissing, then suddenly it features way too many of the banned words :rolleyes:

More seriously, it is a bit my fault ! in my "culture" we do separate thousands in numbers with a dot and the decimals with a comma.

Because this way of doing it is not universal, I purposely didn't put any separators imposing you to count the zeros.

Now you have a problem to count up to 5 :D

Yes, I wrote two hundred thousand songs !

Fantastic Itunes took 3 days to go through my library (where winamp takes 3 hours) and after that it decide to scroll through it again to detect pause between tracks. There is a box to tick to disable that feature but for some reason it was not accessible in my version of Itune. It announced 15 days of work (or I let him run for 15 days not sure anymore) restarting Itunes regulary in order to "aknowledge" the work already done. Eventually one day it simply didn't restart. This is when I discover that the crapiest software ever developped was actually storing absolutely all of the information into one file only. At the time of the crash the file was a couple of gigas or so and with every song I was listening to Itune was updating the playcount into that file So this is a 3 gig file beeing saved every 3 minutes or so. no wonder why it crashed !

So no thanks, No itunes for me !


I'll post something after my test of tomorrow but if anyone has another idea to investiguate I would be happy to hear from it.
Anyone using a DIGIFI system with custom hardware?
 
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chrisccs

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Ok here is the result of my Monkeymote test in connection with winamp.

It is absolutely brilliant !

At least it makes my dream come true for a couple of dollars without changing anything to my favorite setup.
It fullfill all my written specification available here above.
Appart from that it couldn't be completely perfect but I will provide some inputs to the developper of the app and if he is ready to implement them in the next revision, he will have THE absolute audio player front end app (for me at least)
The missing things were not part of the original spec:
- I wish to have the ability to identify file format (I keep MP3 and Flac format when available, so I want to know which one it is)
- Bands like Pretenders are sometime identify as the Pretenders (not by me, by themselves) so when you do a search you can only select one of them to see the available albums.
- I would like to understand how the artwork is stored in the I-Pad. I understand it could take quite a while to store about 12,000 covers ...for the developper to answer

Anyway it is gorgeous, PC users will love this app.

So elking98, thank you, you made my day, week, month and year !!!

Christian
 

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