Can anyone recommend a music player which works well for files that are based in shared folders on a server? I have quite a large number of audio files and would like the program to be able to play them and have a fast search feature, kinda like a library.

I have tried mediamonkey which seems great but it does not support my £150 m-audio sound card (!) and I'm not prepared to be messing around to get it working when every other piece of music software has always worked fine.

Thanks for any suggestions

 

Cheers foobar looks nice I will give that a go when I get home.

Anyone use Jaangle?

 

I have given Foobar a try and I like it but it is pretty terrible with network access, the seek times when skipping through tracks are way too long. A 4 minute song takes a second to seek and it is annoying. A 120min set goes beyong annoying and makes it unusable taking 8 seconds to start playing after seeking!

Doesn't seem like there are any solutions for it, the foobar forum makes reference to this http://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ#why_is_seeking_so_slow_while_playing_mp3_files which is a poor excuse. AIMP, winamp, and WMP have virtually no seek time silence when I stream from the network.

Such a shame as I liked the tabbed UI of foobar and the auto update of the library.

 

It is a 100mbit network the files are stored on a windows home server shared folder. When I copy the files over to local hard drive there is no seek time lag in foobar.

The FAQ of foobar states once a file has been seeked it will seek fine with no gaps I have noticed that this is true when playing back from the network, and even when foobar is restarted the tracks that have already been seeked will seek fine. I got to say Foobar has some very odd coding.

I just gave songbird a try it seems too much for what I need and a bit of a resource hog.

AIMP plays back perfectly from the network.. they playback just like how they would from a local drive, shame the AIMP library doesn't support network folders though.

Yes I have tried increasing and decreasing I would of thought decreasing would improve performance but doesn't.

No one else has noticed this before? Or is it just me having problems with foobar over a network?

 

The console doesn't say anything when it starts seeking to find the place on the track. Mapping a network drive seems to work in AIMP but if I am honest I like foobar better, the layout and the tabs are great. I have posted on the foobar forum, seems like others are having this problem.

That is strange so with an MP3 file that you have never played with foobar before and is say +100MB in size you hear no delay when seeking through the track?

This whole issue is really annoying me now. I have tried all the top programs suggested @ http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-music-players-and-organizers.htm and none of them I am keen on, either the library system is poor or it is too bloated. I am dealing with something like 200GB of music which is on my server and I've got no way of accessing it conveniently using one program which has a fast search engine.

Might have to go back to winamp? Which I still don't think is ideal.

 

Right, after chasing my tail all night yesterday I am gonna go back to using MediaMonkey but use my internal sound card.

MonkeyMedia's database file can be stored on a server which is exactly what I want so multiple computers can access the database/music library at once. Secondly the database is able to handle a huge number of music files, I see some users have terabytes of music present in the library.

http://www.tipsfor.us/2009/03/20/share-and-sync-your-music-library-with-mediamonkey/

Will report back how I get on with it tonight.