[silvine]

Hi,

I am sharing 80GB of music on a SMB share on my Mac upstairs with XMBC running on Windows PC downstairs.

Everytime I run XBMC it loads up all the information for the music (which takes hours). Is there anyway to save this info, cache it or is it necessary for it to load all this information?

Or better yet is there a way to link XBMC to my iTunes library? I used to do this with Plex.

[waltermalter]

Hi,

I am sharing 80GB of music on a SMB share on my Mac upstairs with XBMC running on Windows PC downstairs.

Every time I run XBMC it loads up all the information for the music (which takes hours). Is there anyway to save this info, cache it or is it necessary for it to load all this information?

Or better yet is there a way to link XBMC to my iTunes library? I used to do this with Plex.

Hi Silvine:

first of all you should map a drive on your Windwos 7 computer and use that mapping in XBMC instead of using a UNC path. Usually that is much faster.

Go to the systems settings and disable "update music library during startup". I doubt, that you have new music on your hard drive each time you start your XBMC. So there is no need to update the music library every time.

Most remote APPS (iOS and Android) have a button to update the libraries with a single click. So when ever you have added new files you can use your remote to update manually.

Cheers,
Walter

[silvine]

Okay I'll turn off autoupdate. How do I map a drive? I thought SMB was the only way to share Mac files with a Windows PC?

[waltermalter]

SMB is a protocol.
Using the SMB protocol you can connect to a drive two ways:
1. You use the UNC path (e.g. \\mac-name\share\music)
2. You map a network drive. Instructions can be found here: http://www.vista4beginners.com/Map-Network-Drive

Using UNC is (for what ever reason) quite slow over XBMC. So I prefer mapping a drive and select the drive letter as a new source in XBMC.

How ever, "hours" are way to slow, especially for only 80 GB of music. How fast is your network? Do you have a wired connection or do you use WLAN?

Cheers,
Walter

[silvine]

Thanks. Am sharing via a router wireless N. So do I need to do
Anything on my Mac ie move files or partition? Or do I just point te mapped drive at my os x media folder?

[waltermalter]

No need to do anything at your MAC.
Just map the drive at your Windows PC (at stated in the link I included in my last posting).
Then use the resulting drive letter as the media source in XBMC.

Have you checked the quality of your WLAN connection?
Even it is a "N" connection I believe that is your bottle neck.
Any chance to connect via cable? Maybe DLAN is the answer.

Actual DLAN devices can establish 200 MBIT connections (well they achieve that speed only on paper, but usually they are fast enough for even transferring HD video )

Cheers,
Walter

[silvine]

Hi,

Thanks for your advice a while back. I got the drive set up okay. However, I sometimes notice that XBMC can't access this mapped drive. It's as if the PC is asleep upstairs but I know it's not as XMBC can always access my SMB share.

Any ideas how come?