I recently set up a HTPC which has a wired connection to a gigabit switch that includes my HPMSS. I am trying to use Windows Media Center (WMC) to stream music to my HTPC. When I first got WMC going, I directed it to my HPMSS/music folder. At that point, a small portion of my CD's showed up (and played fine) on WMC.
A couple days later, darn near all of my CD's showed up on WMC. I suspect that the remaining CD's did not show up because they were ripped to Apple's lossless format, which is not Windows friendly. In any event, I had a fair amount of CD's available and was pretty content.
A few days after that, WMC no longer shows any of my CD's. The WMC settings still includes the HPMSS/music folder as a music database, but WMC only lists three or four CD's (none of which I actually own - they must have come with Win7?).
The "user" for the HTPC has full privileges to all of the public folders, including the music folder. In fact, I have ripped a couple of my DVD's to the public video folder and WMC sees those files fine (although I have found the Media Browser add-on to be much more reliable than the default video viewer included with WMC).
I would like to be able to stream music via WMC. Any suggestions on what might be wrong?
If the answer is that the music player in WMC is as unreliable as the video viewer, any suggestions on what I should use in it's place?
I suppose one option is to just rip my CD's through the Windows Media Player. However, I already have them saved on the HPMSS (through the iTunes rips). I tend to want to stay away from downloading iTunes directly onto the MSS, in light of the number of issues with iTunes that I have read about on here.
Thanks for any suggestions/help.