SMB share queuing

[kfiresmith]

Hi WiiM,
The best way I've found so far to mesh my collection with my WiiM has been to use SMB/Samba shares. This seems to give me less trouble than using my Plex.

One thing I'd love to see though when using SMB/Samba/"Home Music Share" would be to be able to select multiple folders to add to a play queue. Right now our only option appears to be to select the first audio track in a folder, from there, WiiM will play all audio tracks in that folder and then stop.

It'd be great if there was a general WiiM queue feature or one specific to SMB that would allow me to dynamically add folders to an ongoing play queue.

Thanks!

 

[d6jg]

@simbun does BubbleUPnP support SMB ?

 

[simbun]

@simbun does BubbleUPnP support SMB ?

It does but I think it only supports folder browsing. Symfonium indexes the remote tracks so is a much better option on Android.

 

[Toad]

Dear Wiim developers,

I'm also very interested in playing music via SMB shares. I don't have a Wiim unit yet but looking at the Ultra.

I'm a DJ and sound engineer so have tons of music and recordings which are not organized by album or any of the usual tags.. the folder structure and filename mean a lot to me, as well as filename sorting by number (as part of the filename).

Also many different formats eg wav, bwf, aiff, flac, aac, mp3.....

But some of the files are tagged so I'd like to see that information too if possible...

DLNA is worthless to me (I have tried) because of the tagging and folder issues.

My current setup is homegrown and includes a headless vlcplayer instance which can access the files.. then I use vlcremote on my phone to control what's playing. It's a very flexible setup with great file browsing, format support and ability to queue files in any order...

But now I'm tired of the complexity of my hacked setup (which has many parts and involves about 5 different apps to control it) and want to simplify by getting the Wiim Ultra, this would also allow me to connect a turntable...

But before I buy I'd like to know just how good this SMB file browsing is, what the limitations are and whether this is a feature you guys are planning to improve over time?

It seems like this is a new thing and very basic, I just want to know if this is a feature that is going to be well maintained and advanced because (for me), it's something that, without it, I should stick with what I have.. then there's no point switching to the Wiim Ultra.

Please LMK what is in store for this.

Thanks!

 

[kfiresmith]

@Toad - I've had the WiiM Pro Plus for about a year now and it's great - if I were in the market I'd def get an Ultra, but I can't justify the upgrade when the Pro Plus has most of the bells and whistles. You'll love it.

For Samba/SMB, the built-in WiiM (Android app) controller for the Pro Plus handles setting up SMB shares and everything has been very reliable and fast - no problems w/r/t reliability or anything.

Right now the SMB/Samba feature allows you to mount both open and authenticated shares, and more than one, and you can bookmark any folder. Browsing complex folder trees is as fast as you can move your fingers. Selected tracks play immediately.

The drawbacks to SMB right now are simply that unless you have created .m3u playlists, I don't see how you can keep the music going beyond a single folder without having to go back into the app and select another folder to play. This is tedious and I'm planning to install MKPL on my Linux system and see how that goes for creating multi-folder playlists - just haven't had time yet.

I'd love to be able to queue up multiple folders within the app but that's so far the only feature I'm not seeing.

I'm just a casual WiiM user but wanted to chime in with my experience in response to your questions. Hopefully the roadmap will have more for Samba at some point. I can at least say that WiiM seem to be very responsive and are constantly releasing new device firmware and app updates so that bodes well...

 

[simbun]

the folder structure and filename mean a lot to me, as well as filename sorting by number (as part of the filename).

Unfortunately an alpha numeric sort is used with no option to override e.g.
1 - xyz.flac
10 - xyz.flac
2 - xyz.flac

But some of the files are tagged so I'd like to see that information too if possible...

SMB browsing is purely for folder browsing, tags are only used on the Now Playing screen - this applies to artwork too, and only if embedded.

DLNA is worthless to me (I have tried) because of the tagging and folder issues.

I don't know what issues you've experienced but I would have thought MinimServer would meet your needs, possibly the licensed version if you need more control (the free version displays the Title tag in "track" view even when browsing by folder).

I wouldn't hold out for this to be developed further.

 

[Toad]

Thanks!

With my VLC Remote setup I'm able to add a whole folder to the queue or individual tracks from any folder and It'll play them in order, and I can flip to the queue view, see what is next.. delete a track, skip around or clear the whole queue.

Playing a whole folder in sorted order is the most common thing I do but I also do play single files often, for example if I have got a folder full of recordings, often each recording is 1.5 to 3 hours in length.. and maybe one of them is for example one is an ambient DJ set, the next could be a hard techno DJ set or it could be death metal, or whatever.

RIght now I can play the ambient set before bed and if we fall asleep it's not a problem as the music will stop at the end. If there's no way to prevent it from going to the next file that's a big limitation, hence my asking what future improvements might be in slated for this type of playback.

I nosed around this forum a bit more and discovered that you can't select files from the Ultra screen either, which is really too bad. I would love to see a future model with file navigation similar to the Pioneer CDJ.. with an encoder to scroll.. press the encoder to select and then a separate back button.

I'm not trying to trash the unit, totally the opposite.. the reason I'm here is because the Wiim looks great and might be just the thing.. but playing from folders is just something that is not well supported by anyone, that's why I've had to implement everything myself up to now. But as said earlier I'm at the point where I want to simplify if I can.

 

[simbun]

but playing from folders is just something that is not well supported by anyone, that's why I've had to implement everything myself up to now.

The WiiM Home app is the limiting factor; try using BubbleUPnP (with MinimServer) if you're on Android.

 

[mlsstl]

Don't know if I'm on track with this reply, but the Wiim App's management of the active play queue is still so-so, though better than it used to be. I still find LMS (which the Wiim players support) a more sophisticated way to handle things if I want to delete or add music (track, album or folder) to an active queue, or reorder the rotation, or use music from different sources (a Qobuz track followed by a local track, for example.)

I don't want to sound too finicky, but it does seem that for all the updates Wiim has brought out, they seem to be more focused on the more exotic stuff like room correction that the basics like improving the queue management.

 

[WiiM Support]

Don't know if I'm on track with this reply, but the Wiim App's management of the active play queue is still so-so, though better than it used to be. I still find LMS (which the Wiim players support) a more sophisticated way to handle things if I want to delete or add music (track, album or folder) to an active queue, or reorder the rotation, or use music from different sources (a Qobuz track followed by a local track, for example.)

I don't want to sound too finicky, but it does seem that for all the updates Wiim has brought out, they seem to be more focused on the more exotic stuff like room correction that the basics like improving the queue management.

Hi mlsstl, Team

Thank you for your feedback on queue management! Our team is aware of the issue and actively working on a fix. We’re continuously improving through firmware and app updates, so stay tuned for enhancements coming your way!

 

[Toad]

Hi mlsstl, Team

Thank you for your feedback on queue management! Our team is aware of the issue and actively working on a fix. We’re continuously improving through firmware and app updates, so stay tuned for enhancements coming your way!

The WiiM Home app is the limiting factor; try using BubbleUPnP (with MinimServer) if you're on Android.

I've tried BubbleUPNP before, not with MinimServer but some other DLNA media servers, the issue is that you can't just browse your filesystem, DLNA wants to abstract the filesystem, it scans the filesystem and builds a database based on tags.. album, artist, genre. That's cool and all but when I have folders full of tracks that I organize for DJing I want to see those tracks in those folders the way I put them. Sometimes I only own one or two tracks from a release I don't buy them all because when you're a DJ you don't buy tracks you're not going to play. If I have an album strictly for my own listening enjoyment then I will have the whole thing.

If I have a folder full of recorded mixes I want to see those recordings the way I left them, organized together not mixed in with albums and singles. Looking things up by tag is a very consumer mentality for media organization, but sometimes I just record an event, take the wav files off the recorder and dump them into a folder.

If you look at what most media player apps can do, eg. Foobar2000, VLC Player, and many others, they have no problem with this. It's just unfortunate that there's no integrated media player solution like Wiim that does what most player apps do. It's frustrating...

I'm a software engineer and audio engineer that's how I've been able to hack together something that has met my needs up to now.

 

[Mr Ee]

I've tried BubbleUPNP before, not with MinimServer but some other DLNA media servers, the issue is that you can't just browse your filesystem

You can if you add the folder via the 'SMB Shares' section.

 

[simbun]

I've tried BubbleUPNP before, not with MinimServer but some other DLNA media servers, the issue is that you can't just browse your filesystem, DLNA wants to abstract the filesystem, it scans the filesystem and builds a database based on tags..

I don't know what servers you've tried but most offer a filesystem like view, albeit from an audio perspective i.e. they won't list all filesystem objects.
I'd be VERY surprised if MinimServer (or AssetUPnP) and BubbleUPnP don't meet your needs.

 

[Mr Ee]

I don't know what servers you've tried but most offer a filesystem like view, albeit from an audio perspective i.e. they won't list all filesystem objects.
I'd be VERY surprised if MinimServer (or AssetUPnP) and BubbleUPnP don't meet your needs.

You're right! (No, I shouldn't be surprised, and now you mention it I do remember it).

I have the free version of minimserver running on my nas, and going into that via the upnp/dnla section in bubbleupnp shows all the normal tag driven ways of finding music, but it also has a [folder view] option.

 

[simbun]

I have the free version of minimserver running on my nas, and going into that via the upnp/dnla section in bubbleupnp shows all the normal tag driven ways of finding music, but it also has a [folder view] option.

Without knowing EXACTLY what they want it's difficult to make a server recommendation because folder view is mostly an afterthought, but they did say they'd appreciate an accompanying tag view which is why I hadn't mentioned SMB with BubbleUPnP/WHA.

 

[d6jg]

An alternative would be to use the likes of foobar2000 with its upnp plugin IF cover art etc isn't required.

 

[mlsstl]

I use Minimserver (free version) for integrating my local collection for Wiim access to my Home Music Share. Here's what the top folder list looks like if a screenshot of that would be useful to Toad. (There are other folders above and below that you can scroll to.)

 

[Toad]

Thanks everyone, upnp was a mess last time I tried it, not useable at all for folder browsing.. and as I mentioned, my files are not friendly to tag-based browsing..

But that was 5 years ago, I'll give it a try again and let you know how it works out.

I haven't bought the Wiim devices yet.. but I can just install the server and use bubbleupnp on my phone to check the browsing capabilities. If it looks good then I'll get one Wiim Ultra at first and see how it goes.

 

[simbun]

Thanks everyone, upnp was a mess last time I tried it, not useable at all for folder browsing.. and as I mentioned, my files are not friendly to tag-based browsing..

But that was 5 years ago, I'll give it a try again and let you know how it works out.

I can't imagine folder browsing has changed much in the last 5 years (I know it hasn't in MinimServer) so it'll be interesting to see how you get on.