ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
For all those that have much more experience.
I am designing a whole house B&O system with zones based on Avant/Essence/A9,A6.
What DLNA server software plays best with B&O. The software would ideally run on a Mac server OR if it is better a NAS.
Thank you for any help
philip
I run Twonky on my Mac mini (iTunes) server which was recommended by my dealer. It works, but not without several issues.
- I had a memory leak that would eat up all the memory and bring the system to a stand still. This would occur on every-other startup. During debugging with the Twonky techs, they had me install a beta to help with debugging. It actually solved the memory leak for me, but nothing was done on their side to do that.
- I use Twonky with my Essence. The second source on the Essence Remote is DLNA. It has an interesting affect that since I didn't choose what to play it appears to use a recently played cache, mostly. It will also throw in other random selections from my iTunes library. When it does this, the songs displayed by the BeoMusic app does not match what is playing. Sometimes it is the same artist at least, sometimes a completely different artist.
- Twonky DLNA may not be immediately available to BeoMusic (possibly the same with other DLNA servers). All the selections are greyed out. I was told by BeoCare that I need to play something from Tunein or another source first before DLNA is available.
- An interesting observation is that everytime I restart Twonky and it scans through my library, It displays a different number of songs and videos each time. I have no idea what this really means because I haven't noticed anything missing yet.
And their may be other things that I can't remember at the moment!
But overall I like it but I hope it improves! The big thing that I like about it as it has a small footprint on my system. The binaries aren't that large.
As Mark-N points out, Twonky is the server SW B&O recommend with its music systems. I also am running Twonky at first with a Mac Mini, but now with my old Mac Pro (former main computer) running as a Music / File Server.
As Mark also pointed out, there are some idiosyncrasies with Twonky, but it works for the most part. My only qualm is that it doesn't see iTunes Smart Playlists, but there may be a bigger issue with smart playlists anyway with the BeoMusic App (it freezes for me). Still no answer or response from BeoCare by the way going on almost 1 month from question submission.
I use Plex without any problems. I am not a massive user of DLNA as a source, but as mentioned it does sometimes take a bit of time to find my server. If I want to speed it up, I find that if I just select my different Wi-Fi network, so if I am my 2G change to the 5G or vice versa, it finds it straight away (hope that makes sense). A bit annoying as a have another player app (8player) which always sees it. I am running an iMac and Essence mkII.
Oh! Also, Twonky has builds specifically to run on NAS devices, you just have to check if there's one available for any device you currently own or are considering.
Here's a page with a rundown of the builds for NAS.