richms: I dont want devices that index and store that on the devices, because they tend to be slow and the indexes get out of date.
Then I tried plex. And it put over a million tiny files in the user account of the user that it was running as on the server machine. Seems each track got a copy of artwork and some other metadata in files for that track.
So I am back to just using foobar2000 and regulaly rescanning the shares. It seems the fastest of any on lousy hardware, but still takes 30 seconds or so to search the library for things, thats with loads of swap thrashing too.
My solution to this:
Setup a dedicated account on your NAS/server for media playback, with "read only" access to the media shares.
So your playback device can see everything it needs to, but it cannot litter the shares with various system-specific metadata, weirdly change your tags or do anything else when you least expect it.
I got bitten once badly with trying out some alternative media centre software and it made a right mess of my media.
Luckily, I had full backup I could restore, but now, by design I prevent any player software from being able to modify or create files on my media shares.
This has given me the flexibility to try anything I like (even iTunes !
), without borking things completely.Player software seems to store it's own metadata/db locally, which in my case is on the nice speedy SSD of the IntelNUC, so is pretty responsive.
