Apple TV for playing MUSIC from NAS, a few ideas, and I like it

[MichielGideon 2]

Hi Emby people, 

 

This post is about the Emby app on Apple TV for playing music. 

 

The good thing about Emby Server & WebUI (& Mac Emby app) for my MUSIC collection on my NAS: 

• It is music tag based and reads "; " for more than one artist or genre. This is great. Absolutely great. Did I say this is great? It is. A computer coding friend of mine had a name for it, multi-something. I say: it is great. 
• Emby can show Album Artist, but ALSO Artist! Compilations galore. 
• Emby has the ability to show an Artist and show
  • 'Songs' (including songs on compilations)
  • 'Albums' (the artists own discography)
  • 'Appears on...' which includes 'general' compilation albums and collaborations, like Greatest Christmas Songs or duets (Artist X Feat. Artist Y)
• The Apple TV app playing music is very much like the 'native' Apple Music experience - that is a good thing in my humble opinion. Coverart showing, music playing, period. After a while Apple TV screensaver - Ok. I can live with that. 
• I really like the 'play on [device]' option, it is more robust than streaming over WIFI in my humble opinion. 

 

Requests - in this order - for Emby doing music on Apple TV : 

1. Show 'Songs' and/or 'Appears on' for an Album Artist on Apple TV  
2. Some information in the topshelf of the Apple TV about MUSIC, like artists recently played or songs recently played, more from.. etc. 
   • At the moment Emby does not seem to give any information about music in the topshelf. 
   • This may be related to Apple TV not giving any music information back to the server if I'm playing music on Apple TV. If I'm playing a track on Apple TV and I look in Server Activities on MacBook Pro M1 it does not  tell me that I am playing a track on Apple TV, like it does when I use the web interface on Safari
   • And that may be related to me not having a movie library (yet). Newbie. 
3. An 'Artists' option in the Emby Music app for Apple TV
   • I request this since I found out that in order to have tracks grouped into albums, the tracks need to be tagged with the same albumtitle and albumartist values.
   • So: for (a series of) compilations there is an albumartist, and a lot of artists underneath! Especially in dance music, compilations, samplers, best of [label]  seems to be the way.. so this would be a useful feature

 

Bugs in Emby playing music on Apple TV (in this order of importance) :

1. In Album, Albumartist and Song view, Emby never reaches Z, unless you scroll to bottom, wait a second, scroll to bottom, wait a second, scroll to bottom.. until you reach Z
   • In my humble opinion this behaviour should be: scroll to bottom > last Z album > swipe to albumpictures and choose the Z album you want  (or similar: scroll to 'middle' > M albums > swipe to albumpictures and choose M album you want)
   • Current behaviour makes scrolling in useless: for example scrolling down to the bottom should bring me to Z albums. In my case it brings me to B albums. 
   • If I scroll carefully through my entire Album view from A to Z it works, but as soon as I sort on albumartists instead of albumtitle the trouble is back
   • Tried 'load images in advance' - no effect - turned it off
   • Turned on / off watching library all the time for changes - no effect - turned it off
   • Located 'cache' on a seperate HD on my NAS (no SSD) - speed increases, but still not able to go to Z without scrolling down again and again and again
2. If you go to 'playing now' in the menu (Start / Favourites / Settings / Search / Playing Now) - the menu does not disappear anymore. And the little round 'Repeat' button is unreachable, probably because of this bug
   • In other words: you don't go "back" to the state of the app after selecting a song in an album and pressing Play
3. Play Next & Add to Queue do not work 
   • If you long-press on the title of a song, you get a menu like: Play now / Play Next / Add to Queue / Add to playlist. Play next and Add to Queue do not work. 
   • Play next DOES work if I tell Emby app/web on MacBook Pro 'playing on AppleTV' to play a song next :). I can also see it in the queue on the Emby AppleTV app
   • Add to Queue does NOT work if I tell Emby app/web on MacBook Pro 'playing on AppleTV' to add to queue
4. Emby stops playing (with a quick fade) few seconds after you open any other app or function in Apple TV, like an app that shows paintings or a fireplace
   • It's is not these apps because they work fine with other music streamers
   • After playing music for a while, Apple's screensaver turns on, but music keeps playing, and you can go back to Emby, no problems there. This could be regarded as a bug, since I turned off screensaver while playing music in Apple TV settings
   • I can live with this bug, because I do not play music to watch a fireplace, but it is cool to be able to do so

 

Humble setup:

Server: 4.6.4.0 on WD Mycloud Ex2Ultra with OS5

App: Emby 1.5.4 (11)

Apple TV: tvOS 15.0 (TV connected with a DAC) 

(Safari webUI and Emby app on Macbook Pro M1 2020)

Library of 16 000+ songs & 5000+ albums/EP's/samplers etc.

Settings: 

Cache: on other HD than music files - increases speed of populating the screen with coverart (even if it's no SSD)

Music folder structure: Other

Library settings: 

Artist Metadata Downloaders: ON (MusicBrainz AudioDB)

Artist Image Fetchers: ON (Fanart AudioDB)

The rest: OFF (including NFO, including load images in advance) - increases speed a great deal and prevents server choking, so Emby reads local tags, including my curated coverart

Monitoring music library all the time OFF - my humble NAS could not handle that, it seems

Best thing ever: tagged an album as genre "Classical; Chamber Music" and Emby found it in both genres / tagged artist as "Artist X; Artist Y" and Emby gave me that song for both artists. Tags IN the songs, not in Emby. This is great. I am repeating myself. 

[Luke 37008]

Quote

In Album, Albumartist and Song view, Emby never reaches Z, unless you scroll to bottom, wait a second, scroll to bottom, wait a second, scroll to bottom.. until you reach Z

• In my humble opinion this behaviour should be: scroll to bottom > last Z album > swipe to albumpictures and choose the Z album you want  (or similar: scroll to 'middle' > M albums > swipe to albumpictures and choose M album you want)

Hi that's very odd. @vdatanet are you able to reproduce?

[Luke 37008]

Quote

Requests - in this order - for Emby doing music on Apple TV

Yes all three of these are on our to do list. Thanks for the feedback.

[vdatanet 1549]

9 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi that's very odd. @vdatanet are you able to reproduce?

No, but my music library is not very big.

[MichielGideon 2]

I could try. In preparation of filming it I did the scrolling and later today found a log. Could be useless, it is not a debugging log. At the moment library is about 6000 music files and I add more, which works fine. Divided it into 5 libraries, Classical, DJ, Mixtapes, Pop etc. 

The log is the moment I was scrolling down down down in the largest library, and then the server sort of choked. Happened before, when I keep scrolling down without waiting. Starts with album art going black and staying black. Server unreachable after a while. Solution: go to Ex2Ultra NAS, reinstall Emby Server, and everything is fine again. Could be my modest NAS. Good thing: nothing gets lost. It's like an oops.. overload.

I did not do Cloud Access in the Ex2Ultra. But Emby Server found a way to download artist info. I do not yet allow Emby to stream to devices outside the home network.   

    

embyserver-63774655673.txt

[Luke 37008]

@MichielGideon have you updated to Emby Server 4.6.7? Are you still seeing this with that?

[MichielGideon 2]

Thank you for looking into it. 

I have updated to Emby Server 4.6.7 

Settings: every music library real time monitoring, artist info + art grabbing on, album art from tags (Image Extractor), advanced settings: Download images in advance*  

* I turned on this setting because in my reasoning it would make sense to have the album art 'ready' when I scroll in Apple TV

I did scrolling Albums on Apple TV 4 this morning.

Observed behaviour on Apple TV 4:

1. scrolling down down +/- 130 album pictures, cannot go down more, but after a second I can continue
2. after reaching bottom of library scrolling all the way up and all the way down works smooth
3. this works for about 1000 album pictures (my Pop library has about that amount of album pictures so works fine)
4. after 1000 album pictures Emby Server does not load every picture anymore, NAS fan turns up (in DJ library, which is close to 4000 album pictures) 
5. I can go on scrolling down in steps of +/- 130 album pictures (in DJ library)
6. after a while Emby shows black squares, but pictures that it already loaded are still there, when I scroll up and down
7. NAS fan keeps blowing - WD Ex2 Ultra Dashboard shows +/- 160 mb memory use for an Emby process (I gave Emby server 192 MB database cache size in database settings, since I never saw it use more than that)
8. By this time server unreachable
9. Emby Server does not stop using this amount of memory, I tried this for one night some time ago, next morning still an Emby process using 160 mb. In Emby Server 4.6.7 I let it go for about 10 minutes. Once server is unreachable, I don't believe waiting helps. 
10. So: in Dashboard WD Ex2 Ultra I restart NAS. Everything fine again. Before I used to reinstall server to be sure, but there seems to be no need for that

Problem seems to be the sheer amount of pictures requested by Emby Apple TV, not the size (most of DJ library is mostly 'modest' 300x300 or 500x500 pics and that chokes, while Pop library contains a lot of 1000x1000 or higher and does not choke)

So it could simply be hard disk speed, or processor / memory speed. I donot use solid state disks at the moment.

But time after time: once Emby Server cannot keep up loading new pictures, the only way to calm down Emby Server seems to be restarting the NAS. That could be a bug, or me pushing Emby server/Ex2 Ultra NAS to the max. 

This time I prepared: I turned on debugging log  

 

 

embyserver-63780349465.txt

[MichielGideon 2]

Update: 

I did Vacuum Database and restarted Emby Server yesterday.

This morning scrolled through all 4000 albums in DJ Library in about 20 times scrolling down. 

All art loaded.

NAS was hard at work, but Emby Server did not choke.

To test this I changed album sorting from Z to A and did it again. All art loaded.  

So if I go to Album in the library it takes me a couple of scrolls to get from A to Z 

After reaching 'Z' for the first time,  I can scroll al the way up back to 'A' in one long scroll and all the way down to 'Z' in one long scroll.

So I can also scroll to 'halfway down' to find albums from artists starting with 'M'. Or scroll about one third down to find albums from artists starting with 'I'. Etcetera. 

Settings in Library still: real time monitoring ON, artist info + art fetching ON, (album art fetching OFF), album art from tags (Image Extractor), advanced settings: Download images in advance

This is much better then old situation, because I donot need to worry Emby Server will choke if I push it real hard.

Vacuuming helps. Thank you.  

[MichielGideon 2]

Update 2: 

If I try scrolling though the DJ Library while playing my favourite endless jazz playlist, Emby Server chokes like before. Could of course be me pushing my humble WD Ex2 Ultra NAS too hard..