Media but esp. Music station and music streaming best set up

[Waveydavey001]

Quite a few newbie questions here but I have tried[i to rtfm and have a go.

For background
- I had an old Synology and have now moved to QNAP.
- I have set with an Admin account and two user accounts so far
- My music 51739 tracks so far. Is in the admin multimedia area in a set of varying in quality organised folders and is a mix of FLAC, MP3, some wma and the occasional wav
- photos will go into the user accounts indexed as multimedia
- videos might be a mix between admin ( films etc) and user (shot on phone, camera etc)
- Dunno where I might put book files etc yet
- I intend to stream tracks to my Cambridge media player, by Bluetooth to a couple of things and stream/download to my phone
- videos to the Samsung Smart TV
- not sure about photos
- I have the standard apps, the media streaming add on and codex pack 4.2.1 installed
- I have the QNAP iOS apps

Now the Questions
1. On the Cambridge and the Qmusic app all my files seem to be in alphabetical order in folders and don't play in album sequence despite the ID tags being there. What am I doing wrong?
2. Is there a way of either automatically creating an MP3 version of any flac or is there a way of transcoding on the fly flac to MP3 when streaming to mobile?
3. Will videos in admin be the only videos seen when streaming to to etc or do all videos in multimedia folders (including users) get seen
4. As above for users
5. If it is only the admin for 3 and 4 is there a way for users to stream to to sets etc
6. Are some of the other options in the App Store (minim server, plex etc) better options and if so do I need to uninstall other apps

Apologies for any dumb questions. I am trying to fathom my way through the mammoth manual, honest

[Spider99]

Some pointers

You will have more control and features with apps like plex/emby - the built in apps are poor and limited as you have seen
i tried the built in apps and gave up - i uninstalled them and or turned them off
with plex et al you can control by user what the get to stream
you can transcode on the fly but dont expect to transcoding to work for all media to say a 4k tv - cpu on nas not powerful enough - but you can transcode off line etc - hd movies etc should be fine being stream as long as you use a wired network - wireless will work but you need a good signal - poor signal lots of hassle
with bluetooth you need to be careful what dongle you use as some types dont work - search the forums for models that do

Tip try and get one thing working well before moving on - less confusion as you learn your way around

Have fun

[Waveydavey001]

Thanks for the pointers. I will have a search around for the best option to use.

Dunno what I'm gonna do about the iOS app seeming to not recognise tags when using folders. Very annoying. I guess I'm going to have to find a great batch tag editor for the Mac

[Spider99]

if you use plex or emby tags should be less of an issue for you

try mp3tag - works well for me on windows and has a mac version

[Waveydavey001]

Thank you I'll take a look at that as well. I used to use MediaMonkey (God do I miss that) but have just discovered the rather excellent MusicBrainz Picard. That is a very useful tool if you have a Mac and a bunch of lazily ripped tracks

[Spider99]

Picard looks interesting

[Waveydavey001]

So I realise there are quite a lot of experts on this forum who probably think my bumbling level of ineptitude annoying or at best "cute" but for those with my amazing level of expertise I thought I'd give you an update on where I am so far. Who knows someone might find it useful at some point.

the original Questions
1. On the Cambridge and the Qmusic app all my files seem to be in alphabetical order in folders and don't play in album sequence despite the ID tags being there. What am I doing wrong?
It appears, nothing. It is the fault/issue of the default DLNA Media Server (beta). I installed and enabled Twonkymedia server and this shows up separately as an input on the server. Select a folder here and it uses the tags in the albums to sort and play in the right order. Hooray.

For those who suggest that I tag better. I agree but lots of one off tracks, Internet downloads (mashups etc) has made this tricky. As a Mac user there is no great tagging app I've found but see previous posts for a couple of better ones including Music Brainz Picard

2. Is there a way of either automatically creating an MP3 version of any flac or is there a way of transcoding on the fly flac to MP3 when streaming to mobile?

No luck so far. There might be a couple of apps on the App Store that might do this, who knows

3. Will videos in admin be the only videos seen when streaming to to etc or do all videos in multimedia folders (including users) get seen

it appears it is the admin accounts. Users can beam/share when looked in but when the admin account is shared it looks like admin folders only. I'm no longer sure (already) if this is the default or me playing with defaults in shared folders (doh?)

4. As above for users

As mentioned above. You can beam, share etc when logged in as a user
5. If it is only the admin for 3 and 4 is there a way for users to stream to to sets etc
^^^

6. Are some of the other options in the App Store (minim server, plex etc) better options and if so do I need to uninstall other apps
Haven't got further than Twonkymedia yet. Some forums suggest you should move your library if you install other stuff so haven't dared yet

NEW QUESTION

7. If I can't use the out of the box apps (Qphoto, Qmusic, etc) on my iPhone/pad without the DNLA server being enabled is there a way (or another app) that uses tags to correctly order tracks when searching through folders?