Apologies if these queries are obvious, but my searches don’t find anything consistent.
I’m looking at potentially moving away from my 9-unit Sonos system, which is slowly strangling my Music Library aspirations (I don’t stream music from outside).
I have all my music on a QNAP NAS (TS-462), with just over 30, 000 tracks so far, plus 1400 playlists They are all in a carefully arranged tree, so I can find whatever I want and populate it further (eg from a PC).
Playlist entries are all “relative path”, not “absolute path”, so chunks can be relocatable.
With a ‘file browser’ GUI, I can easily navigate to what I want without a proprietary music index.
Does the Arylic system have to make its own index, or can it just browse a folder tree without one?
If it indexes, is there a limit to the number of tracks it can handle?
Or can it let the user browse an attached NAS file store from a defined base folder ?
Hi, current Arylic devices will browse the UPNP shares in tree structure, like common upnp clients do.
I don’t quite understand, what is its own index, it will browse what upnp server shared.
And for the tracks, it does have limits, the app now only browse 100 songs in each query…
Thanks, zpl1025, for the response. >I don’t quite understand, what is its own index
Things like Sonos insist on not using the file structure but creating their own index of all tracks , nomatter how they are scattered across the source area. Probably to make life easy for untidy people. Trouble is, it has to maintain that index in each of the Sonos rendering units, and if something’s a bit old (like mine) it runs out of memory at around 64,000 tracks. Worse, every time a track is included in a playlist, it counts as an extra track - so if all tracks appear in at least one playlist, you only get 32,000 tracks max before it craps out.
>And for the tracks, it does have limits, the app now only browse 100 songs in each query
Now I don’t understand.
Do you mean that, in any one folder, it won’t “see” any more than 100 tracks ?
What if a playlist contains more than 100 tracks - is that a problem ?
My “Christmas songs” playlist has more than that to avoid mindless repetition over the holiday season…
It could see all tracks when you scrolling, but only 200 songs will be added into list and play. I’ve just check on the latest 4STREAM APP and seems the number is about 200, but it’s for sure that not all tracks are added. This is a known problem…
Hi windbag, I suspect I am in the exact same situation as you, wanting to move away from Sonos due the appalling situation very many users find themselves in after the new Sonos App was forced on us, and now we can’t access our own extensive music libraries we have stored on NAS drive or other media.
I also have been looking at Arylic as an alternative. But unless I am reading it wrong it seems that Arylic can only index and work with a maximum of 100 tracks. Like you I have tens of thousands of tracks that are organised by artist or album.
I don’t quite understand how Arylic works in this regard and how you select albums / artists etc. and the related tracks. As regards playlists, I certainly don’t need to set up a playlist longer than 100 tracks, but I do need to be able to identify and select from tens of thousands of tracks so that I can add a few (less than 100 is fine) to a playlist.
I am having trouble understanding if Arylic can do this, or if it can only handle maximum 100 tracks on a NAS drive of stored media… ???
Ah, well, this is a where things go awry. It may be that a upnp shares the tracks, but a whole shedload DON’T serve up the playlists correctly. I’ve found time after time that the controller app (eg on an android phone) can pick up the server share and browse to the full rage of tracks, but when directed to the tree structure with the playlists (which ARE there) it returns “No thing found” (or similar). One problem is the NAS running on Unix expects folder delimiters to be “/” whereas windows (where I’m creating the playlists) writes them as “'” (reverse slash won’t display on this screen!).
Pretty straightforward to translate, you’d have thought, but server after server fall flat on their face at this point, which is driving me crazy.
My NAS is a QNAP, and they even have a special flag to enable their server to pick up playlists, but at the moment, do they heck. I’ve currently got a support ticket with QNAP to investigate, but this far down the road of playing source music from your NAS source, this inability is ludicrous, and should have been properly sorted years ago.
I have found one, recommended by a phone app utility, and discovered that it, too didn’t work! After dialogue, a developer has just got it going, but has deficiencies in other aspects that even the S1 controller could accomplish.
I shouldn’t have to be working this hard, so many years after the invention of the NAS, music files and playlists !
JonD - it amazes me that Arylic can send me half a dozen FB adverts for their hardware every week, but can’t seem to detail the actual technical limits of their system.
I do need to have playlists of more than 100 tracks. Such a playlist is less than 10kB to store, so what is the problem?
My NAS has a fully working browse tree, so why do Sonos (and Arylic ?) need to have their own proprietary index that duplicates the job - and then moans about memory usage ?
I’ve been badly burned by Sonos selling me out to musical freeloaders who want to stream their music for free, and repeatedly diminishing what I was told I was buying into (which included a full mesh network internet access port system at each unit at my buy-in) and then trying to make my premium price units into bricks-with-an-LED.
I’m a fair way down the road of being able to browse my NAS tracks AND play my playlists AND send them to the Sonos units direct without Sonos software at all. A problem remains in that the Sonos App is still needed to set up groups and ? volume ?, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to send kosher BBC radio. But I’m in active development on on those fronts.
Arylic being coy with their system limits has simply stopped me from experimenting with their kit as a Sonos alternative.
It’s not just the price of the kit, it’s the hours of trying to work out if it will do what you want it to do - that is a real cost that I’m not going to invest without solid evidence that Arylic can replace Sonos AND won’t stuff me down the road of kit redundancy by forcing “upgrades”.
I’m not going to get burned again.