Post Wed Mar 29, 2017 12:16 am

iTunes Questions

In spite of the date associated with my ID, I'm a newbie and have some questions ...

I am trying to stream songs from iTunes on a PC (Win 7) to my home AV system via a Sony Blu-ray player (BDPS370) and a Sony dongle (UWABR100). Wi-Fi connectivity has been established. There are 5,000+ songs in iTunes segmented into a dozen or so playlists. The album artist and album name are not present in any of the songs in iTunes. Each song in iTunes has an instance of album art. When setting up Serviio, the shared folder was set to C:// Users/(me)/Music/iTunes. The initial run of Serviio was uneventful but some issues where raised when viewing the results on the AV system:
1. After studying other posts, I was able to get my iTunes playlists into Serviio by setting up a folder and using the export playlist function in iTunes to populate this folder with m3u playlists. I did this individually for each playlist. And I recognize that I will need to repeat this process as the contents of a playlist changes in iTunes. However, when playing a playlist, I did not get a shuffle option. Is this an issue with Serviio or my Blu-ray player? Further, assuming that a shuffle capability is not forthcoming, what is the sequence in which Serviio populates the songs within a playlist? I would at least like to get a playlist in song name sequence vs. artist name sequence since that is at least some degree of randomness.
2. In spite of there being no album name in iTunes, the album view in Serviio shows an album name for most songs with the album repeated for each artist with a song in the album (e.g., if the actual album contained a mixture of songs by several artists, the album view contains an instance of the album name for each of the artists with their particular songs). In addition, there are many 'unknown' albums shown. Where did the album name come from?
3. The artist view in Serviio typically shows an 'all music' entry and 'unknown' entry for each artist with that artist's songs repeated in each entry. What causes this?
4. In spite of there being no album artist in iTunes, the album artist view in Serviio presents one (equal to the artist name). And similar to the artist view, Serviio typically shows an 'all music' and 'unknown' entry for each with the songs repeated. Where did the album artist name come from and why goes it get presented this way?
5. In almost all cases, iTunes only contains a composer name for classical music. Yet the composer view in Serviio shows no composer (everything is in an 'unknown' entry - although I have not verified whether or not everything is present). What happened to the composer names?
6. The random songs view in Serviio shows many songs but the logic behind this is not obvious. What is the criteria for a song appearing in this view?
7. None of the views in Serviio contain album art. Why was it lost?
8. Where are the file(s) containing the Serviio details of the songs stored?
9. If any additional information needs to be captured for resolution, please provide detailed instructions since I don't know my way around the app.

I apologize for the long post but I was unable to resolve these questions in reviewing the existing postings. And thanks in advance for your help and assistance.