One of the main reasons why I decided to buy a Synology NAS back in 2009 was that it could run Logitech’s Media Server (formerly ‘Squeezecenter’).
If you own a Squeezebox you now surely know what I’m talking about, for everyone else: Logitech’s Media Server (LMS) is a piece of software which indexes your media library (music, videos, …) and streams them to a media player. We own a Squeezebox Radio, which I initially bought to be able to listen to BBC radio in the kitchen. After playing around with it for a little while and realising that I could stream our whole music collection to the thing I was intrigued.
I’ve also installed the linux client (Squeezeslave) on our media center PC, so that we can use that to play our music or radio through it without having to turn the PC on since you can remote control every Squeezebox or other client which connects to the LMS using a nice Android app on your phone.
So, in total you get quite a nifty setup but it has been lacking one thing… not anymore: iTunes integration.
For now I’ve just pointed the LMS to the folder where our music is stored, it would scan it and make it available to be streamed. Since we use iTunes to organize our collection I’ve always somehow missed the possibility to play playlists which I’ve created in iTunes. LMS has native support for playlists but I could never get my head around exporting the iTunes playlists and converting them so that they would work.
If you make LMS read your iTunes library you will also be able to access and play all your playlists and here is how to do it:
(For this to work, both your iTunes library file and your media folder containing your media must be located somewhere on your Diskstation)
- Go to the settings page
- Under ‘Basic settings’ remove your music folder from the folders to be scanned by LMS, you don’t want your music added twice
- Under ‘Plugins’ scroll down until you find the iTunes integration plugin, enable it and restart LMS
- After LMS has restarted go to the newly added ‘iTunes’ tab and set the location of your iTunes library xml file and where your iTunes media folder is located
- Confirm and wait until the iTunes library has been scanned.
- Voila, enjoy some of your iTunes playlist on your Squeezebox!
