XBMC as desktop media player replacement
#1
Howdy XBMC-ers,

I want to build a HTPC with OpenELEC. I have a NAS in a cupboard so as not to hear the spinning disks. I also have a desktop computer in a different room and a laptop anywhere. I completely get how to have XBMC work with my NAS from the HTPC.

When I'm behind my desktop, however, I can't listen to music played by my HTPC. I have access to the same NAS, so I can use my own media player (winamp / iTunes / whatever) to play things on my NAS. However, I would really like to just have one music library where any modifications in artwork, lyrics or other meta-data from one device, immediately propagates to any other device.

I can just run XBMC on the desktop and access the same database from the NAS. However, the UI for XBMC is designed (quite well) for HTPC use. On my desktop, I prefer to have an interface where I can access long lists of songs etc; much like iTunes / winamp / etc.

I've tried googling, but my HTPC-lingo isn't yet up to speed, it seems. What I was wondering: Does a front-end of this manner exist? Alternatively, are there desktop media players that can use the XBMC database format? Is there a web-interface that is geared towards use from a desktop that I've overlooked? Am I asking the wrong question and should I look at other things?

Thanks very much for any replies.
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#2
On the web interface front what have you tried because AWXi (see my sig) and XBMC Control Web Page have or are list views?
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AWXi - Ajax web interface. Wiki
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#3
From the screenshots this seems to be precisely what I'm looking for. Keep in mind - and please excuse me for the fact - that I'm a complete XBMC-n00b. I've set my music sources and if I use AWXi to browse through the files, I find them, but "Music >> Artists" or "Music >> Albums" just gives me a blank screen, also after a "Music >> Library tools >> Scan library". I must apparently do something to fill the library that I haven't yet done, or.... am I wrong again?

(Btw. I had only seen AWX from the "Get more..." options, installed it and run it, so this is why I never saw any lists)
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#4
I'm guess you are using files view within XBMC and haven't actually added anything to the library. Hence the blank artists and albums page. Do you have artists and albums in the XBMC GUI? Check Adding music.

I guess you are using version 11 (Eden) as well?
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AWXi - Ajax web interface. Wiki
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#5
holzensp - XBMC can also act as UPNP server (you can enable this in Settings -> Network IIRC). So any desktop media player that understands UPNP has access to your XBMC library. That ofc requires that XBMC is running.
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#6
Correct me if I am wrong, but for music, why would you need XBMC on the desktop at all... If you ave organized your Music on your NAS properly and all the MP3 tags are correct, you can use anything on your desktop and point to your NAS folders as the media locations... Winamp...iTunes...

My music library is organized in my NAS as Media/Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/01-SongName.mp3

In addition, if you can install Subsonic on your NAS, you can again point it to where you media is, and it can stream your music to your mobile devices outside your of your home network.

This is how I use my system...
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#7
Sorry for the slow reply; I was away for a few days.

@Mizaki: Your comment about the file-view confused me, because I only had the choice between "Files" and "Add-Ons". I found now that I could right-click on a media source and tell it to "scan to library." Quite the face-palm moment, especially considering that I do now have "Artist" etc. as options for Music. Also, yes 11/Eden.

@da-anda: That sounds like a great tip! Thanks very much. I will be looking into this later on. Really, I should have thought to google UPnP for XBMC, but, like I said, I'm a bit of a n00b on the media-center front.

@hernandito: I see where you're coming from and I agree to some extent. There are two annoying little downsides for that approach to me. 1) Quite a few players that I like actually keep their on library and you can tell them to rescan their sources, but then you need to do that for every player that you're using and 2) I can't always change the ID3 tags of the files - the reason being that I sometimes offer music I was involved in the making to others, where my indexing and meta-data collection is not necessarily what others want (e.g. quite a few people don't want album art in ID3, but just as a file in a folder). Thanks for the comment, though.
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#8
Having looked at a few UPnP clients and the background-performance of XBMC, it seems the better solution to have some sort of ultra-lightweight server to share my music using UPnP and letting XBMC simply function as a client.

More experimentation seems useful, though.
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