Music Library Network Activity

[Taddeusz]

I have all my music on a seperate computer from my SageTV server because I use iTunes and it's not really advatageous to keep the main store on the server. I'd like to be able to play music from SageTV but whenever I specify that shared folder and my client is active on my server I get constant network activity between the server and the machine that the music is on regardless of whether I'm actually listening to music or not. It just never stops. The bulk of my music collection is AAC files. Wondering if there is a way to stop the constant network activity. I don't have the same problem with my imported vidoes share.

Also wondering if there is a way for SageTV to see the album covers from the AAC files? It views the ones from MP3 files just fine but all my AAC files have no album covers.

Any help would be great. Thanks.

[Opus4]

A debug log would probably indicate what the network activity is. If you are scrolling through the music collection, any album art will get transferred to the client as each is displayed. Or, maybe it keeps trying to find album art for the ones that don't have it.

- Andy

[Taddeusz]

Ok, I'll try that out when I get home.

[Taddeusz]

Ok, I have my SageTV server running in service mode and run the client on the same machine. Where does the SageTV service put the log file? I can't seem to find it.

On another note. If I've stopped the service and restarted it the network activity doesn't start until I start the client. But does not stop when the client is closed and seems to continue indefinitely.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Ok, I have my SageTV server running in service mode and run the client on the same machine. Where does the SageTV service put the log file? I can't seem to find it.

Unless you are running Vista, the log file should be in the same directory as where SageTV is installed -- where the exe files are. But, don't forget that you have to stop the service before editing the sage.properties file.

- Andy

[Taddeusz]

I added the line debug_logging=true to both the sage.properties and sageclient.properties files and the only one that seemed to have any effect was to the client. I got a rather short log file. But nothing if I only have it set in the sage.properties file.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

debug_logging=true

If that is exactly how it appears in the properties files, then please check the FAQ details again because it should be TRUE, not true. And, SageTV can't be running at all when you edit those pre-existing properties files.

What OS and version of SageTV are you using?

- Andy

[Taddeusz]

It's running on XP SP2.

Case sensitivity sucks but to each their own. Ok, here are the two log files up to this point. The activity isn't actually constant. It seems to stop for a short while every now and then and then start back up. I seem to remember an option to prevent SageTV from automatically checking for changes in media folders. Could this be what I need to disable? Although I also seem to remember that I've tried that before and it didn't change anything.

The server doesn't appear to be opening any files. I can watch the share activity on the other machine. The connect time is always some relatively small number of seconds. Idle time is always zero.

[Opus4]

If you have it periodically scanning import dirs & you have import dirs on your network, then yes, that would be causing network activity.

Your best bet is to send the logs to SageTV so they can see if anything wrong is happening.

- Andy

[FidgetyRat]

I too am a mainly Mac guy and have a pure AAC collection. To get the music set up appropriately this is what I did.

1) I do copy the files to the server. Better to have a media server house files rather then server->file client->media server.

2) Reading album art from the file never works well, especially for AAC. The best bet here, is to create a physical copy of the art and store as "folder.png" inside the album folder.

The real catch here is that itunes is a bitch to get at physical art. In order to do this, I found a script "save album art to album folder". I modified the script to save each cover art as "folder.png", resized to 200x200. Then, you just click one song from each album and tell the script to have-at-it.

It then extracts the art from itunes, resizes the images, renames, and stores in the same folder as the songs.

3) after that process is complete, copy the files over to the sage server. Don't forget that Mac does not play nice with windows and loves to leave behind ".DS_STORE ._DS_STORE and ._song.m4a" files behind. You have to make sure you remove these hidden files, Particularly the ._song.m4a files. If sage detects these, it will think they are valid songs and will freak out.

4) Finally, refresh your library and all will be great.

Note, the default ID3 tag of 2.2 works fine with AAC and sage.

IT seems like a lot of work, but with sage's media player, perfection is expected for proper operation. There is no gray area.

Once its all set up, you could always link your mac to use these files instead of the other way around. Its just better to have a server house files then act as a client.


Also note, transcoding of AAC files to an MVP works perfectly fine and uses about 7-10% of my 3.06 celeron.

[Taddeusz]

Well, my iTunes library is on a Windows Vista machine. I couldn't just have the music on my SageTV server. I'd have to keep duplicate copies. I take the machine with the music on it with me on occasion and I'd like to have the music available on the machine. I'm going to try and make some space on the server but for the time being this is how I have to do it.

I guess I'll just deal with the network activity for the time being. The only funny thing is that I tried running DameWare Remote Control to that machine the other day and for some reason that caused the Sage client to go batty. It was kind of odd.

On a side note, is there any way to just shuffle play your entire music library without having to create a playlist?

[Taddeusz]

Well, I disabled the auto import directory scan option and that seems to have worked this time.

Does anyone know the periodicity that SageTV uses to scan changes in import directories? The only thing that I can think is that my music library is so large that it ends up scanning seemingly indefinitely. So that once one scan ends the next one begins. My media doesn't change often enough for it really to matter all that much. I'm just glad the constant network activity has stopped.