Sharing music on USB

[Steve Woodhouse]

I’m asking this at the WiiM Amp section. I want to know for the Ultra, but I presume functionality will be the same.

If I have a WiiM Amp/Ultra and a WiiM Mini, and I have music on a USB drive attached to the Amp/Ultra, can I play that on the Mini?

 

[Brantome]

Yes, it just appears under Home Music Share like any other UPnP server on your network

 

[Smartplug]

I’m asking this at the WiiM Amp section. I want to know for the Ultra, but I presume functionality will be the same.

If I have a WiiM Amp/Ultra and a WiiM Mini, and I have music on a USB drive attached to the Amp/Ultra, can I play that on the Mini?

Yes, I have both and able to access usb drive on app while using the pro. It was neat feature. I’m really curious about usb out. So, if my thought is correct, connecting amp to external dac then the amp become just streamer and dac become the new preamp. Nowadays, dac has adjustable volume that can be use as preamp.

 

[harkpabst]

I’m asking this at the WiiM Amp section. I want to know for the Ultra, but I presume functionality will be the same.

If I have a WiiM Amp/Ultra and a WiiM Mini, and I have music on a USB drive attached to the Amp/Ultra, can I play that on the Mini?

To be absolutely clear, just any UPnP client on your network can connect to the internal UPnP server, not just WiiM devices.

Just out of fun and because I can I'm currently playing three different tracks on three different receivers (including H-iFi Cast on my phone and my Lyngdorf's UPnP client.

I see no reason at all why the Ultra should behave any different.

 

[Brantome]

To be absolutely clear, just any UPnP client on your network can connect to the internal UPnP server, not just WiiM devices.

Just out of fun and because I can I'm currently playing three different tracks on three different receivers (including H-iFi Cast on my phone and my Lyngdorf's UPnP client.

I see no reason at all why the Ultra should behave any different.

Yeah, the Ultra is in many ways an evolution of previous devices, so hardware differences aside, most if not all of the features should carry over

 

[simbun]

Always remembering that playlists are a bit brittle because of the underlying indexing.

 

[harkpabst]

Absolutely. If I remember correctly, WiiM already confirmed that the Ultra will have the same powerful 4 core CPU as the Amp.

Admittedly, I haven't even tried playlists on my Amp, so far.

 

[simbun]

Admittedly, I haven't even tried playlists on my Amp, so far.

Keeping a backup of the wiim_cache folder and files.db (from memory) might be enough to prevent the track ids from changing, just in the case the cache or USB drive become corrupted.

 

[harkpabst]

Keeping a backup of the wiim_cache folder might be enough to prevent the track ids from changing, just in the case the cache or USB drive become corrupted.

Good idea. As long as the structure of the cache folder doesn't change that might be all that is needed.

I manage all the music on my NAS using MusicBee and then also use this tool to synch with USB drives I use. Either in my car or for my WiiMs. Mainly to try out how they work in the latter case, because the do have direct access to that NAS, of course. I'm not a playlist guy in the first place, I usually listen to albums. But thinking about it I do have a couple of interesting playlists on my streaming services ... let's see ...

 

[simbun]

Good idea. As long as the structure of the cache folder doesn't change that might be all that is needed.

I edited my previous post to include files.db. I think they're the two files/folders WiiM uses.
I've got a miniDLNA install here so I'll try it later

 

[simbun]

Using the backups worked with MiniDLNA.

MiniDLNA assigns a sequence number for each track based on its position in the filesystem (alphabetical order of parent folders), so I placed 3 albums in the content directory e.g. Babylon By Bus, Concrete and Gold, and Definitely Maybe

MiniDLNA scanned those files, and I created a playlist containing the first track of each album.

I stopped MiniDLNA, renamed files.db and art_cache to emulate a corruption/new USB key, and copied a new album to the root of the content directory, one that started with a letter before the existing albums e.g. A Kind Of Magic.

After MiniDLNA had completed its scan, the tracks in the playlist were now pointing to an earlier track e.g. the Babylon By Bus playlist item now pointed to a track from A Kind Of Magic, although the metadata remained the same (saved when added to a playlist).

After stopping MiniDLNA and copying files.db and art_cache back to their orginal location the rescan fixed the issue, with A Kind Of Magic now appearing after the other albums by URL.

So, assuming that WiiM behaves in a similar way and never performs a reload rather than an incremental scan, keeping a backup should enable you to persist the track relationship and ensure playlists never go out of sync.


WiiM asked me last week for any DLNA bugs that I was aware of, so I have fed this back to them, and hopefully this will get resolved soon as all they need to do is use the filesystem location in the URL (encoded).