Accessing music files correctly

[Oldnog]

I have an oled55c7V and a storage device on the same wireless network.  The storage has lots of music and photos. The TV can access the device and see the data on it. It seems to deal with photo albums fine. However it doesn't present the music information in a good way, making it effectively useless. Grateful for help!

The  music on the external storage is, as you would expect, stored as albums and tracks. The tracks are files and the albums are folders.  The issue is that I can't see a good list of folders, ie albums, which is what I really want.

If on the TV I select music, it shows me the device and can then click on folders. Unhappily, it shows me 10,000 individual files (ie tracks) first) so it takes 10  minutes to scroll down to find the folders. This looks to my naive eye to be a fault: if I search on folders I should get folders.

Another search option is on albums. Trouble with that is that it finds only about 20 albums, and the remaining 10,000 tracks are bundled into a single 'unknown' folder. So that's no good either but why is this happening? Why has it failed to identify the vast majority of albums. When I look at them on my PC I can see no difference between the folders and their contents for the few the TV does recognise versus the many that it does not. For example, we have a fair few Beatles albums with only two recognised by the TV. Those two did not arrive on the storage by a different route than at least some of the others, and they look identical on my PC (they are basically MP3 files, the folder also contains a very small file called ID).  Whe I try to seach by other criteria, eg artist, I get the same very small sample.

What seems to be going on here is that some attribute in the folders (which I can't see) is causing some to load as albums but most not.

One way out of this would perhaps be for me to navigate down the file structure on the NAS as I do on my PC. But I can't find a way to do that on my TV. Is there one?

Grateful for help!

 

[PeterV]

I noticed the standard build in apps from LG are a bit primitive. You can better look for apps that play music or use DLNA servers from you computer that can display the content much better. Examples are Serviio or Plex but there are more.

[Oldnog]

Thank you for this. It looks interesting and I will follow it up. But really I would still like to operate the TV directly as I expected to be able to! My wife, too, the PC is in another room. So I'm still looking for an answer to the question, if there is one, on those lines. But still thank you again for this, I'll try it.

[Oldnog]

I have installed Serviio and I think it can see my NAS but I can't see how to ask it to browse folders on it. In other words I can ask it t browse drives on the PC and directly attached drives, but not the NAS.

[PeterV]

I have never done this on my home computer (mac) but on my work I mapped remote discs to a network drive. Then you easily access is.

[Oldnog]

OK I have done this so I have my NAS mapped to a drive. If I click on that on my PC, I see its file structure. Unfortunately if I click on browse within Serviio I don't see that drive letter.

[PeterV]

Problem is, I use it on a Mac and can not really help you here. 

Maybe you can find your answer 

link hidden, please login to view

 on the serviio.org website. Can not imagine that you can not acces a NAS with it.

 

Or  in a youtube tutorial

[George Hofmeister]

I used Serviio but soon moved to Plex as it seemed to be (at the time, 2+ years ago) a more rounded solution.  What NAS do you have, possibly it may support Plex and/or Serviio?

[PeterV]

After some time I also moved to Plex. I found that using the native Plex app for LG TV made the interface much prettier. I have never used a NAS with Plex or Serviio so I can not help there.

[Oldnog]

Thank s for comments. The NAS is a Netgear Stora. I'm afraid I could not make Serviio find it, so still looking for a solution. Sounds like I should try Plex.

[George Hofmeister]

On 19/02/2018 at 7:35 PM, Oldnog said:

Thank s for comments. The NAS is a Netgear Stora. I'm afraid I could not make Serviio find it, so still looking for a solution. Sounds like I should try Plex.

Hi,

Assuming yours is the model listed in the following link then unfortunately Plex is a no-go as your unit does no have the requirements to undertake transcoding:

link hidden, please login to view

Like PeterV I'm not using Plex on a NAS; but on a standalone server set up.