[MikeyWilko]

Hello All

Just signed up as I'm hoping that XBMC is the solution I'm looking for. I really hope it is after the amazing reviews I've been reading about it.

Soooo....

Currently, I have all my music on my Ready NAS Duo box and I want to be able to play this music from multiple devices. I can see that XBMC can handle this perfectly ok, but I do have a couple of questions. I had thought that maybe pc's and tablets will be able to just play the music after XBMC is installed on each device. In the wiki, this comment "When your collection is scanned, XBMC stores all the tagging information (artist, album, year, genre, etc) in the database" leads me to believe that a database must exist somewhere. Could someone please explain to me where that database is held? Does it mean that I should have a pc as a main controller which will have the database on it and pointing to the NAS drive and then all my other devices communicate to that pc? Or, is the database held on the NAS drive meaning no controller type pc is needed? Also, when the scan is made, are the existing music files changed in any way? I only ask as they may wish to be played from elsewhere in their current format (xbox).

I hope all that makes sense and I would welcome any further info from this. If this is elsewhere in the wiki that I may have missed, then I apologise now but I am unable to find it.

Thank you all for your time. I'm hoping this is my solution!

Kind regards,
Michael

[D0nR0s4]

You have two choices, by default XBMC creates a local database on the machine it is installed on.
This means you would have multiple database which is in itself nothing bad but results in a need to update all databases by themselves each time your collection changes.

An alternative would be to set up a centralized database which is pretty much what you described.
I would refer you to this wiki article for further information. It also has a link to upnp sharing which is another option you can use to have a centralized database. Some nas offer the ability to store and grant access to mysql databases so you might want to check that for your specific nas.

As far as I know, XBMC should not modify your files in any way while scanning, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

I hope this helps so far.

Edit:
I just realised I did not explain how to scan the items to the database, as it is sometimes hard to find for first-timers. So here we go:

Firstly again a wiki article.

What you basically do is, you add a music source and then open the context menu on that source (right click/ button 'c' on the keyboard) and select scan to library.

[MikeyWilko]

That's great, thank you very much for your reply. The links you have included are extremely useful.

I think I might try the Pi option and have that as hosting my central database with it being connected to my NAS box. That way, all the other devices can connect to the Pi. It's a cheap way round it I believe and it gives me a great excuse to have a play with the Pi at the same time! It will certainly be a good place for me to start.

Thank you again for your reply.

[nickr]

Many NAS boxes run mysql, if they do, there is no need to run mysql on the pi. It is just another box to manage.