Configuration of Media Server on a Mac (Snow Leopard)

[martinsmac]

I've had a frustrating time getting the Media Server working on my iMac so I wanted to share what I did in case that saves anyone else some grief.

My version of Media Server was obtained via Pure for use with their internet radio.

The problems I encountered were as follows;

1. Unable to save any configuration, including the license key, when using the browser based configuration tool.
Solution: I manually edited the ini file that holds the configuration. This file is located in the Library/Application Support/TwonkyMediaServer directory, which is in your home folder. The file is called twonkymedia-server.ini. You can edit it with a text editor (I used Text Wrangler, which is well worth a look), though you may have to right click on the ini file's icon and select an application to open it with. I just pasted in the license key after the following cdkey=. I then wrote in the location of my iTunes library after contentdir=+M|. I also set the vale for the following scantime= to 120.

Once I restarted the server these values were visible in the browser-based config tool.

2. The server does not appear to restart, or the configuration tool cannot be accessed on http://localhost:9000/config
Solution: This was really annoying and I'm still not sure what was going on, or what I did to fix the problem, but after waiting several minutes the config tool did come back after a restart. I stopped all of the firewalls on my iMac just to confirm and this was not the cause of the problem (Pure's help is pretty bogus in this respect).

3. I cannot access the content, and the config tool (status) indicates that the database progress is still "in progress." I left the server to chug away all night, but this status remained and I was unable to get any content via my radio.
Solution: The database is located in the same directory as the ini file, see above. If everything is working, the "date modified" value of the folders in this directory will update, and the configuration tool will eventually show the time of the last database build, along with the number of songs found and the cache size. I only reached this point by going to Maintenance on the browser-based Configuration Tool and selecting "Rebuild database." This took the server several minutes to do, and there's nothing much to show what's going on. I looked in the DB directory to check that files were appearing and modified dates were changing. The config tool doesn't come back either. I closed the browser window I had been using and opened another one, after a few minutes the tool showed up again. At this point I was able to play my content on the radio.

Hope this helps someone else.