[tomx2]

Hello i searched the "how to" and "general" questions sections without any luck. I am looking for WMC alternative. I have a very large music collection and a dedicated pc to play these files. My files are all meta-tagged with all the information i need or want (so no streaming or downloading of info required). In fact the player pc is not and will not be connected to the internet. I am looking to not only display my album art, but the metadata attached as well. i.e. band bio's (comments), year released, composer, etc, etc. So, my question is/are: Is Kodi a good choice? Is it possible to display this info with Kodi? and Could someone point me in the right direction to find others (that are doing/wanting the same thing) or step by step solutions for setting up what i want?

Thanks
Tom

[scott967]

Well, I only use Kodi now for music, so I guess it's a good choice for me, but can't speak for you.

Since Kodi is available without charge, doesn't hurt to trial it on your system. I would only download and install the latest version 16 aka Jarvis (at this writing it is pre-release RC1). For trial purposes I would copy a portion of your music files and folder organization to a new location (something like a "testmusic" folder) as the first time you run Kodi you will want to add your music files to the Kodi music library, and that will take some time.

There is an extensive wiki for Kodi, and I would work through that plus a little video searching will turn up many vids on installation (if you find that better than working through text).

I've never run Kodi on an unconnected system, but don't see any reason why that would be a show-stopper.

scott s.
.

[jac55]

I'm still using XBMC 13.2 as my music player. IMO once you have tested a version KODI and are happy with it, I would scan a small section of your music to the KODI library (as suggested by scott967) while connected to the internet to see the benefits of the fanart on a connected TV or tablet remote controller. If you like the idea of the additional artwork, then scan the whole of your music collection to the KODI library while connected to the internet.

I do not think the lack of an internet connection causes KODI to complain, but it is nice to have a connection for when extra music is added to the library so the scrapers can do their work searching for new artwork.

[denogginizer]

Tom,
While this is a Kodi forum, you did ask; "Could someone point me in the right direction to find others (that are doing/wanting the same thing) or step by step solutions for setting up what i want?" So, I hope I am not breaking any rules here.

I also looked for an alternative to WMC and moved to XBMC / Kodi on Raspberry Pis and it worked quite well for Movies and TV, but I was not too happy with it for Music. It seemed rather slow and kind of a pain to get to the music I was looking for.

I ended up running Logitech Media Server on the computer that hosts my music. ( http://forums.slimdevices.com/forumdispl...ia-Server )

The music is then accessed via a locally hosted web page or a Squeezebox contoller app for mobile devices.

Squeezelite runs on my Windows computers as a service and actually plays the music on the computers. ( http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread...ep-by-step )

For stereos around the house, I plug in a Raspberry Pi to each one and run PiCore Player. ( https://sites.google.com/site/picoreplayer/home/ )
For the Pi attached to my main stereo, I did add a cheap sound card. It looks janky, but sounds very good.
You can see a picture of that here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R89EIWM9MYB...nstruments

Everything can sync or play separate.