MMA as the ultimate streaming client?
Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2013 8:00 pm
Hi -
Having been a very long-time MMW (Gold) user and advocate, I was very excited to finally see MMA for my Android phone and tablets. However (and please correct me if I'm wrong), MMA appears to be primarily a very flexible tool to sync content from the PC to Android via MMW - in other words, to download entire tracks to the Android's local storage so they can later be played without an Internet connection. Is that a reasonable description? Although it also offers DLNA streaming connectivity, that functionality is really limited by DLNA itself and can't/doesn't offer much of MM's huge potential added value.
If so, I guess I'm a bit disappointed: What I have really been seeking for years now is a solid (read: flexible, fast, powerful) way to access my entire PC-based music collection from Android, and to instantly stream and listen to whatever I select. Ideally, I'd also like the option of rendering that stream on either the local Android client and/or a different remote rendering device. Personally, I have zero interest in syncing entire tracks to my phone -- that's what my 120 GB iPod is for.
I've tried every solution I can find over the last few years, but most Android products seem at their core to be just generic DLNA clients. Some are better; some worse - but frankly, the more I use DLNA the more painfully aware I become of its bugs and limitations. I've tried a number of different DLNA servers, running on both on my PC my NAS; accessed by a number of DLNA clients including a Sony SMP-N200 Media Player, my new Panasonic Viera TC-P65VT50 plasma TV, and all the available DLNA clients for Android. I've also tried Web/server-based solutions like Plex, Subsonic, etc. So far, not a single combination has really worked satisfactorily. None of them seem able to handle extremely large music libraries (MMW says my collection currently includes 104,400 tracks spanning 568 MB), or provide anything even close to the kind of flexibility I've always enjoyed with MM Windows needed to easily find and access things (for example, it's totally useless trying to scroll through thousands of artists or albums with interfaces that scroll only one line at a time!) Also, since DLNA is designed for local LANs, real hacks are needed by products that attempt to offer outside internet access to an internal DLNA server.
To me, the perfect MM Android product would let me select a MMW sync server (just as it does now). But instead of syncing content, I'd like to sync just a local copy of my complete MM library into a local Android SQLite database. The user interface to that local library could be similar to what you've already done in MMA, with a goal of delivering as much of the search & access flexibility of MMW as possible but redesigned to leverage an Android Holo-style touch interface. Because the entire library (not content) would be in a local database, MMA should be blindingly fast at finding what I want, including local app support for things like different views (standard, Classical, etc.), first-letter positioning and thumb-scrolling within long lists, dynamic creation of auto-playlists based on criteria, etc. Once I select content, I could choose to stream it to my device (preferably with some standard protocol that does NOT rely on DLNA); route that stream to a different rendering device via uPnP/DLNA, which seems to work ok for that limited purpose; or actually download the selected content to the local device as MMA does now.
It just seems like you've already done so much of the 'heavy lifting' in creating an MMA app - stuff like finding/connecting/syncing with a MMW server, a decent local player interface, etc. And you also have the real 'crown jewels' to work with, which include the SQL-based MM database catalog on Windows plus the design and functionality of the MM client that you've refined over so many years. I'd just love to see you go just a little further by leveraging all of these to offer the ultimate streaming music client (maybe you could name it "MM Nirvana" instead of just MMA?
). After trying everything else, I've never found anything that would even come close to this. And as a software marketer myself, I think this kind of Android product could serve as a 'trojan horse' to drive many more sales of MMW Gold, which should be required as a server (MMA itself could even be free, because the real value and revenue potential comes from the MMW server).
My sincere apologies if I'm missing something and any of this is already possible or at least planned. And please don't interpret this as criticism of what you've already done with MMA... I'd only like to see it leverage all of your MM technology to deliver by far the best mobile client in the market, just as MM has always been on Windows!
Thanks, Rob
Having been a very long-time MMW (Gold) user and advocate, I was very excited to finally see MMA for my Android phone and tablets. However (and please correct me if I'm wrong), MMA appears to be primarily a very flexible tool to sync content from the PC to Android via MMW - in other words, to download entire tracks to the Android's local storage so they can later be played without an Internet connection. Is that a reasonable description? Although it also offers DLNA streaming connectivity, that functionality is really limited by DLNA itself and can't/doesn't offer much of MM's huge potential added value.
If so, I guess I'm a bit disappointed: What I have really been seeking for years now is a solid (read: flexible, fast, powerful) way to access my entire PC-based music collection from Android, and to instantly stream and listen to whatever I select. Ideally, I'd also like the option of rendering that stream on either the local Android client and/or a different remote rendering device. Personally, I have zero interest in syncing entire tracks to my phone -- that's what my 120 GB iPod is for.
I've tried every solution I can find over the last few years, but most Android products seem at their core to be just generic DLNA clients. Some are better; some worse - but frankly, the more I use DLNA the more painfully aware I become of its bugs and limitations. I've tried a number of different DLNA servers, running on both on my PC my NAS; accessed by a number of DLNA clients including a Sony SMP-N200 Media Player, my new Panasonic Viera TC-P65VT50 plasma TV, and all the available DLNA clients for Android. I've also tried Web/server-based solutions like Plex, Subsonic, etc. So far, not a single combination has really worked satisfactorily. None of them seem able to handle extremely large music libraries (MMW says my collection currently includes 104,400 tracks spanning 568 MB), or provide anything even close to the kind of flexibility I've always enjoyed with MM Windows needed to easily find and access things (for example, it's totally useless trying to scroll through thousands of artists or albums with interfaces that scroll only one line at a time!) Also, since DLNA is designed for local LANs, real hacks are needed by products that attempt to offer outside internet access to an internal DLNA server.
To me, the perfect MM Android product would let me select a MMW sync server (just as it does now). But instead of syncing content, I'd like to sync just a local copy of my complete MM library into a local Android SQLite database. The user interface to that local library could be similar to what you've already done in MMA, with a goal of delivering as much of the search & access flexibility of MMW as possible but redesigned to leverage an Android Holo-style touch interface. Because the entire library (not content) would be in a local database, MMA should be blindingly fast at finding what I want, including local app support for things like different views (standard, Classical, etc.), first-letter positioning and thumb-scrolling within long lists, dynamic creation of auto-playlists based on criteria, etc. Once I select content, I could choose to stream it to my device (preferably with some standard protocol that does NOT rely on DLNA); route that stream to a different rendering device via uPnP/DLNA, which seems to work ok for that limited purpose; or actually download the selected content to the local device as MMA does now.
It just seems like you've already done so much of the 'heavy lifting' in creating an MMA app - stuff like finding/connecting/syncing with a MMW server, a decent local player interface, etc. And you also have the real 'crown jewels' to work with, which include the SQL-based MM database catalog on Windows plus the design and functionality of the MM client that you've refined over so many years. I'd just love to see you go just a little further by leveraging all of these to offer the ultimate streaming music client (maybe you could name it "MM Nirvana" instead of just MMA?
). After trying everything else, I've never found anything that would even come close to this. And as a software marketer myself, I think this kind of Android product could serve as a 'trojan horse' to drive many more sales of MMW Gold, which should be required as a server (MMA itself could even be free, because the real value and revenue potential comes from the MMW server).My sincere apologies if I'm missing something and any of this is already possible or at least planned. And please don't interpret this as criticism of what you've already done with MMA... I'd only like to see it leverage all of your MM technology to deliver by far the best mobile client in the market, just as MM has always been on Windows!
Thanks, Rob
