Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Playt Music from Network Drive to android/iphone other mobile/networked devices

How to use Optimus V to seemlessly play an entire music collection over wifi (>20,000 files) from a network drive, no server needed.

May require root. This makes my music collection completely portable around the house and I don't need to run any power hungry always on server to do it. This solution does not make the collection available outside your home wifi network but works great at home.


1) Install MortPlayer from the market. MortPlayer can read any folder as your network share. In addition, it does not require volumeid so it can index your files that are on your network share that you will mount to your sdcard without issue. (Other players won't work -tested PowerAmp, Default Music player,Meridian... many others -they won't index from a sd mounted share)
2) Install Mount Manager from the market. This is better than CIFS Manager because you can automatically connect on wifi.
3) In Mount Manager, map your network share for instance 192.168.1.116\music or whatever it is to your sdcard. Set the sdcard mount point to be something like sdcard/music2 or whatever you choose. This will make your entire music collection viewable under sdcard\music2 or whatever you chose as the mount point.
4) In Mount Manager, enable the settings to connect automatically to your shares when you connect to wifi, and disconnect when disconnected from wifi.
5) Launch Mortplayer and select the share you created on the sdcard as the primary music folder. Next wait patiently as Mortplayer indexes your gazillions of files. This could take a long time so make sure your phone does not shut off wifi during the process. You may need to tweak your battery saver or other settings to make sure it stays alive depending on your configuration.
6) In Mortplayer, make sure to turn off the scanning. Configuration>Preferences>Initialization>Update Folder Structure>Never. I would only manually scan if needed if you have a lot of files because it takes forever to do the initial scan.
7) (Optional -recommended) Make a backup of Mortplayer and its data if you can so if something gets foobared, you can restore the app and its data so you don't have to re-index again. I use Titanium Backup for this.
That's basically it! No server needed. You can play all your files from attached network storage. I welcome questions, comments, criticism, or improvements to this setup!