Network Serving from one computer??

[fxsales]

Greetings All,
I'm cross-eyed from reading through all the posts here to get a simple answer (i think) to get my charley-foxtrot of a music library under control and accessible from anywhere on my network. I have itunes on a PC taptop that I've invested many years ingesting, tagging, and re-tagging the music on there, and it's only about 2/3's thorough. My network consists of my media center in the living room including a Yamaha whole-house receiver hard wired to a gig-e router. I have an app on my iPhone that controls the receiver and allows access to my network. Up until now I have been using Serviio as a media gateway to get music from my laptop to the receiver and out to the areas of the house I want it in. Serviio doesn't play well with iTunes (go figure)
I also have a new unmolested (no media) Win8 home-built beast in the office that is hard wired to the network and was recently forced to purchase a Dell Venue Pro 8 tablet with full 8.1 Windows software. I've only got about 60gb of music in the Itunes media folder on the laptop, but also have a USB 3.0 Seagate with 585gb of barely catalogued music on it. (Currently movable to either laptop or PC.)

My ultimate goal would be to house all of my music on the Win8 home-built computer in my office (including Seagate USB attached) and be able to access the library in an orderly fashion (including playlists) from my tablet wirelessly from the patio ( can go bluetooth to the Yamaha receiver) I only have 15Gb on the tablet (SD card) for media, so excepts for a few playlists for travel, most of the media must reside elsewhere. Eventually I will add a 2TB D: drive to the home-built, but for right now my main catalogued library will only need 100gb or so.

My initial experience with MM was to download the Metro app, which didn't look like the full app, so I deleted it. I then downloaded the MM8 full version on the home-built and all seemed to be going well. It took about 4 hours to "look through" my 500gb drive. I then tried to import music from my iTunes media file and things started going to hell. Then I got up this morning and it was trying to copy the whole 500gb drive to a drive on the home-built with only 300gb of space. I deleted and uninstalled all aspects and am back to square one., as the folder list an organization was less than manageable.

So, can I do what I want and control with the tablet and have music reside on home-built in the office? Should I just stay with Serviio, or do they work together? I'd eventually like to have about 100Gb of cleanly catalogued music in one place (including several playlists), with all the other to access when I need it.

If you are still here, thank you for your patience and help. I am a 55 year old guy that has damaged a few cells through recreation over the years but am still gamefully employed in the IT/Broadcast industry and truly appreciate your help.

John

[Lowlander]

MM8 is a beta app in it's early stages of development and thus rough around the edges.

MMW can act as Media Server which any DLNA capable client can play from, this includes other MMW installs as well as MMA and MM8, but also WMP and any DLNA capable hardware (stereos, TVs, set top boxes, smartphones, etc.).
DLNA also allows for control of server to client playback (see BubbleUPnP on Android) so your tablet/smartphone can be used to control what plays on the client (MMA can't do this yet). MMW can also Play To a DLNA client from the Player.

The benefit of using MMW as your Media Server is that you get access to all the tagging capabilities (many Media Servers lack in this) as well as access to AutoPlaylists (Gold feature) and Play History tracking (can be useful with AutoPlaylists). For music I'd say MediaMonkey is a very capable solution.

[fxsales]

Thank you for taking time to respond.

I am in the process of migrating my main 60gb of listening music to the new Win8. I'm amazed at how "clean I think my iTunes library is, then when I copy it to a Windows folder there's ton's more metadata and crappy naming such as track numbers that aren't showing up in iTunes. My theory was to start with a clean database. Do you think I'm wasting time bymoving these manually to the music folder in the new machine?

My eventual goal is to manage the media with MM8 in the new machine, then install MM8 in the tablet and purchase the wi-fi option to act as a control interface with my entertainment system.

Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks again!
John

[Lowlander]

I don't know too much about iTunes other than that Artwork is done in a proprietary non-standard thus non-compatible way. It may also fail to save tag changes to the actual files or it's a setting you missed (MediaMonkey allows you to disable saving tags to files).

Renaming the files themselves is easy in MediaMonkey with Tools > Auto-Organize Files, however this would require that the tags are in order (as they're used). It sounds like you may have some work ahead in tagging the files.