[strangedaze39]

I have a Mac main server, but my HTPC machine is a windows7 machine. I can easily share my mac's music folder to my htpc but it is horribly organized compared to how it appears in my itunes music library. I've used plex a while back for sharing itunes library's and it was much more organized. So I was looking around and scoping out the different possibilites for sharing.

So far I've found:
Firefly
Connect360
Allegro Media Server
Twonkymedia Server

I'd like to be able to share Apple Lossless and AAC which rules out Twonky although it appears to have good upnp capabilities and a nice interface.

Has anyone had luck with Connect360? I've found some other posts but no successes stories. It would be great if that worked since I already own a license and have it running on my server.

Now I haven't done much testing on this, I just wanted to ask around and see how you might share a large organized itunes library from your mac to your xbmc. Before trying to reinvent the wheel.

Happy Holidays

[interceptor121]

firefly works with XBMC but to be honest it does not get closer to synching your tuens onto that ATV that is what I do

[strangedaze39]

Yeah I always found firefly to be kind of messy, I'm going to give this Allegro a shot it supports apple lossless and seems to be pretty flexible.

Hopefully I'll be successful.

[jmarshall]

Have you tried just scanning your itunes music directly into XBMC's library?

[strangedaze39]

@Jmarshall: Yeah thats how it is now, but I'm a avid music collector, so my library is constantly growing. Since all that happens on my main machine/server which is a mac and everything is very well organized in iTunes it'd be nice not to organize a constantly changing music library on 2 machines. Unless your talking about some method that keeps both organized.

[xeonicxpression]

I'm confused. I use itunes to orginize all of my music and then just have XBMC scan the itunes library folder. If you let itunes organize everything into folders then it's all nice and neat. If you add new music you just update the library and in a matter of seconds all of the new music is there. Am I missing something?

[strangedaze39]

Yeah, we must have different experiences. When I simply scan my itunes music folder into XBMC I get artist name duplicates song and tracks out of order. Like in iTunes I have 1 "A.A. Bondy" (artist).
In XBMC I have "AA Bondy" and "A.A. Bondy". Just little things like that but lots of them. I'm obsessive about music organization so it just drives me nuts.

[jmarshall]

Then your tags are messy in that case - XBMC makes no assumptions at all about what your tags *should* be, and instead assumes that you know what you're doing. iTunes may simply not be reading all of the tags, and/or you may have edited them in iTunes but it didn't update the tags, or it may be making assumptions about things to try and pretty things up.

Under the assumption that you want to use something other than iTunes for your music at some point, taking the time to clean up the tags would be a worthwhile endeavour.

If you don't care about that, then there's an iTunes addon (available via the addon manager I think?) that you can play around with.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[xeonicxpression]

Yea jmarshall is right. All you need to do is fix your tags. If the artist and album artist tags are different it tends to make things messy. Also, keep in mind that capitalization and spacing matter. Even spacing can mess things up pretty bad. For example "AC/DC" != "ac/dc" and "ac/dc" != "ac / dc" and for sure "AA Bondy" != "A.A. Bondy". It can be a real pain in the butt to make sure everything is correct, but once it is you're life will be much easier. I think mediamonkey is a pretty good program for fixing tags. Otherwise, you can just use itunes to edit the tags also. I believe mediamonkey has an automated way of doing it though.