Where can I find a manual for TwonkyMedia Server?

[STurtle]

Is there a comprehensive manual available about configuring the TwonkyMedia Server?

I did not find one under downloads, and the zips for the Server seem not to contain a PDF or such either.

I am a bit lost on how to configure the TwonkyMedia Server to suit my needs. It came built-in with my QNAP TS-219p NAS box, and basic functions work (i.e. I can see Video/Music with my WD TV Live right away and out of the box), but navigating the content is a bit of a nightmare.

In particular:

• What is the effect of the number choices in the custom tree dialogue, where I can select a value in the range "-","1","2","3","4","5"?
• How do I avoid album art png's that accompany my music files in the music-folders from turning up under photos as well?
• How do I see said album art when playing a music file? (Each album has its own folder, and the Amarok player downloads and stores an albumname.png in each folder automatically, but apparently TwonkySever wants such pictures in a different format.)
• How do I tag or rate my Music/Movie/Photos, so that TwonkyMedia custom folders work correspondingly? (E.g. I have rated my photos with an xml-photodatabase. How do I turn these ratings into something that TwonkuMedia recognises and allows filtering for? At least, the custom tree offers an option called "Rating" but how do I use that?)

[PeeBee]

•What is the effect of the number choices in the custom tree dialogue, where I can select a value in the range "-","1","2","3","4","5"?

If you set 1 then you see a separate entry for A, B, C etc - selecting an entry will show all entries beginning with that letter.

2 groups the start letters in pairs i.e. AB, CD, EF etc

3 groups them in threes - ABC, DEF etc

Try it and see, you won't break anything.

How do I avoid album art png's that accompany my music files in the music-folders from turning up under photos as well?

Have separate content locations for Videos, Music and Photos so that the images in your Music tree aren't also seen as photos - instead of one top-level folder for all content.

How do I see said album art when playing a music file? (Each album has its own folder, and the Amarok player downloads and stores an albumname.png in each folder automatically, but apparently TwonkySever wants such pictures in a different format.)

From http://www.twonkymedia.com/howto.html:
How can I add album art if it’s missing?
Most music software will let you add album art to music files. Just launch Windows® Media Player, right click on a file and select Find Album Info. It will display a list of matches on the right side of the screen. Click on the one that matches best and press Next. Click the Finish button and you’re done. You can also use Winamp or other software to do this.

If Winamp™ or Windows Media Player fails to find the album art you’re looking for, go to Amazon.com or Wikipedia® and type in the name of the album you’re looking for. Once you locate the album, double-click on the album art and right-click to save it to the folder containing songs for that album. Then rename the image “folder.jpg”. TwonkyMedia manager will display the album art the next time it scans your music folder.


PB

[STurtle]

Thanks a lot! Pretty much everything solved then!
(But how should I have learned all that, apart from experimenting or asking?)

Pitty that I configured my musicplayer (AmaroK) years ago to save the album art as "<albumname>.jpg" rather than the generic "folder.jpg", but that is easily fixed.

So the only thing that remains is ratings and tags, but I discovered that a few fotos are indeed tagged. Guess I need to switch my photo manager program (Kphotoalbum) to DigiKam, since it those tags added from an experiment long ago that I see now.

[STurtle]

Try it and see, you won't break anything.

That is actually not right: Entering "-1" in as the rescan intervall as advertised in the text next to that entry field kills the TwonkyMedia Server and requires manual restoration of the config files - at least for the version included with my QNAP NAS-box. Not a nice experience.

As the fix they announced that the next firmware update by the end of this month will update TwonkyMedia Server to version 5.x. So how will this affect the above tips? E.g. do I still need to rename all the Album Art to folder.jpg, or will v5.x also allow folder.png or album.png?

[PeeBee]

If you set 1 then you see a separate entry for A, B, C etc - selecting an entry will show all entries beginning with that letter.

2 groups the start letters in pairs i.e. AB, CD, EF etc

3 groups them in threes - ABC, DEF etc

Try it and see, you won't break anything.

You took my words out of context - nowhere did I say anything about changing the scan interval.

PB

[STurtle]

You took my words out of context - nowhere did I say anything about changing the scan interval.

Well, that is true to some extent, I am sorry for misinterpreting it that way. However, this was honestly how I understood your words, but nevertheless my previous post was not meant in a bad way at all.

All that I meant to add was something along the line saying: "I am afraid to experiment with the settings in general, because I have already been burnt."

So I took your quoted words as a general encouragement to experiment. Now I see that what you meant is that it is safe to experiment with this number setting.

In any case, I am very grateful for your explanations!

[Twonky_Rick]

How do I tag or rate my Music/Movie/Photos, so that TwonkyMedia custom folders work correspondingly?

TwonkyMedia manager is the only software I'm aware of that allows you rate all 3 media types (music, photos and video). If you're a TMS user, it only costs something like $10 to upgrade from TMS 5.0 to TMM. https://buy.twonkymedia.com/UpgradeToMediaManager.aspx

Although I work for the company who makes TMS, I'd like to point out this other software that does this as well.

- If you just want to rate photos, you can use the Windows photo editor that comes with Vista. There are probably other apps as well. There's more info about this here: http://www.twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.ph ... 714#p20573

- If you just want to rate music, you should be able to do this with WMP 9 (and possibly other versions). There are probably other apps as well (like MediaMonkey).

- I haven't found any other software that rates video, if you know of something that works with TMS, please post it here.

- Rick

[STurtle]

How do I tag or rate my Music/Movie/Photos, so that TwonkyMedia custom folders work correspondingly?

TwonkyMedia manager is the only software I'm aware of that allows you rate all 3 media types (music, photos and video). If you're a TMS user, it only costs something like $10 to upgrade from TMS 5.0 to TMM. https://buy.twonkymedia.com/UpgradeToMediaManager.aspx

Well, I am running TMS on my QNAP NAS Box. The full version of TMS is part of the firmware, so I believe I cannot change that, right?

Although I work for the company who makes TMS, I'd like to point out this other software that does this as well.

- If you just want to rate photos, you can use the Windows photo editor that comes with Vista. There are probably other apps as well. There's more info about this here: http://www.twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.ph ... 714#p20573

No I do not want to rate or tag all my 7750 photos again - I want the ratings and tags that I already have for each and everyone to be used and displayed by the TMS!

I know that this is possible, since my DLNA player that is connected to the TMS running on the NAS-Box already has tags and ratings for some of my photos. The tags are definitely my own, no one else would categorize photos that way. I thought that they would stem from an old SQLite3 database called "digikam3.db", which was in the Picture's root folder and matched the shown tags. The file was created a long time ago by experiments with the KDE Image Database program "digiKam". So I changed some tags and received a file "digikam4.db", which, after upload and a TMS rescan, did not affect the tags offered for the photos. I am not using digiKam anyway, just experimented with it at the time. I am using the KDE Linux application "KPhotoalbum", which uses an XML-database. However, methods exist to transform one into the other.

Hence I would like to know which format of picture information are understood by TMS, in order to convert my current database for use with TwonkyMedia Server.

Thanks for the link, as it appears it might answer that question: IPTC
I can export the tags in my existing XML database to IPTC info inside the pictures.

Knowing the required specification is the key here for me - and surely the developers of Twonky Media Server must know these - as I do not know anything about Windows Applications.



UPDATE: IPTC is not read at all.
However, XPM metadate is read, and the proprietary Exif-Tags created by Vista & Co are as well.

What I do not understand is: Why can't this be clearly stated? I wasted a lot of time to test all this.

[Matt42]

Well, the overarching question has been sort of avoided on this thread: Where is the manual?

I have another question that I'd normally expect to learn about in a manual: Similar to creating an "Artist Index" entry in my music tree limiting selection to 2 or 3 letters, how do I create a "Playlist Index"? Playlists don't show up in the custom tree but are magically added by the server.

Bonus question: How do I remove "All tracks" from the tree? Setting the entry to blank doesn't work.

Thanks!