I want access to all my music - from anywhere!

March 18, 2008

Posted in: Computers, Music, Nerdom, Networking, Reviews

Tags: address, Archos, audio, browser, coolest, core, download, FAQs, firewall, Folder, gig, Installation, LAN, Library, Music, network, page, phone, port, router, support, TVersity, video, WAN, website

How many of you guys love music? How many have a music library at home, and don’t have enough gadgets to carry it all with you every where you go? Yeah me too. I mean sure I have a 2 gig flash drive, a phone that will play MP3’s (2 gigs), I have an Archos that will play audio and video (30 gig) but I still find myself wanting to play something I don’t have stored away on one of my devices - this presents a problem.

Well it looks like I found an answer!

I didn’t think it would have been hard to please me. I only had a few core requirements, everything else would have been icing.

1. I wanted to be able to access my music from anywhere (mainly for work, because…well that’s where I spend a majority of my time).

2. I wanted something simple.

Really that was it for core requirements. As for icing requirements, I have too many to list. The product that I settled on meets the 2 cores and has a couple of icing ones that make for a great product. I think I might be able to reduce my current full pockets of gadgets too.

So what am I using?

TVersity

What is that you say, well it’s only the coolest media server since sliced bread - of course sliced bread and media serving having absolutely nothing to do with each other, but… TVersity is a simple to set up and easy to use network (LAN/WAN) media server.

You can read all the FAQs and Guides on their website, but I’ll go through the quick and easy set up and what I did to get it working.

Sorry guys - TVersity is windows only (server) but the capabilities run across the board. By that I mean you can run it on a myriad of devices. It really seems to be limited by devices that are either supported directly or with browser/flash [9] support. They have a great page on what is supported, ways they can be supported or devices that are supported.

So what did I do to get it working for me?

First visit the site then download the package.

Installation is pretty straight forward.

Once it’s installed, launch the program. By default it probably won’t be sharing anything (if the icon is gray it’s not sharing). Now let’s set up our shares.

Make sure you have “Home Media” selected then you can click on the green plus sign or file -> add. Now if you’re like me you’ll have your music somewhat cataloged into a main folder. Mine happens to be aptly named “music” on my D: drive. So choose “Folder” as the type and give it a titl, tag, and menu. I choose to only do music as it searches the folder because that’s all I want in it.

Then let it add content to it’s system, it’ll take awhile (depending on how many files you have residing). But once it’s done you can test it through the built in “Library” tab. You can click and play around here, but if it’s showing your files then you’re doing good!

So once you know your library is working we can move onto something a little more technical, getting it to work on your network. For simplicity at this time, I’m only going to go over the web type. I’ll go over UPnP devices later (after I work on it).

Let’s move over to the “Settings” tab and have a gander at what’s going on here. I would leave a lot of the defaults here, you can change the ones you need to, but for the most part you shouldn’t need to, except for the section under “Home Network”.

As you can see, you need only a port number and if you want to share outside your home network you need to check that option and create a username and a password. A couple of caveats on this, you’ll need to open this port up on your firewall and your router (if needs be). I had to manually add the port to the Windows Firewall and also forward the port on my DLink router. Once that was done I was able to access it by using my ip address in this manner http://ip.add.ress:41952/flashlib You can get your ip address by using online services like http://whatismyip.com/.

Once that is done, try it out.

Here I am listening to a little bit of Fugazi - Waiting Room from my house while at work. I know it’s a little clunky for navigation and there are some other concerns, like it sometimes stops serving on it’s own or fails to respond every so often. I tried it with video, but with everything I have running at home, it was a bit chunky - but no matter I wasn’t looking to stream video.

Final thoughts:

I think this product rocks! For a free piece of software this really meets a lot needs one might have. It allows the sharing of content on your local network in a couple of simple steps, which opens up so much fun. You can even share media outside your network, but I would be careful about how many people are connecting at one time. Not only would it saturate your bandwidth pretty quickly, it could open up other issues with copyright concerns.

Posted in Computers, Music, Nerdom, Networking, Reviews