How to enjoy the music stored on Synology NAS with Audio Station

Overview

The Synology NAS server is an ideal solution for you to store and manage your music library no matter how large it is. With Audio Station, you can always enjoy your music stored in your NAS anytime on any computer. Audio Station also supports a large selection of file types, so you can enjoy your music in any format the way you like.

This article will guide you through the essentials of using Audio Station to enjoy music stored on your Synology NAS.

Contents

1. Before you start
2. Install Audio Station
3. How to use Audio Station
4. Configure Audio Station

---

1. Before you start

This article assumes that you have done the following tasks for your DiskStation:

• Hardware installation for Synology DiskStation.
• Software installation for Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM, web-based operating system of DiskStation).
• Creating volumes and shared folders (See here).
• Creating users with access privileges (See here).

Refer to Quick Installation Guide for more information about hardware and software installation. You can also see Synology DiskStation User's Guide (available at Synology's Download Center) for a general idea about topics related to this article.

Return to top

2. Install Audio Station

For DSM 4.0 or up, please follow the steps below to enable Audio Station.

1. Go to Main Menu > Package Center.

2. Select Available tab, then click Install for Audio Station under Packages by Synology.

3. Select a volume to install the package on, and then click Next.

4. Confirm the settings and start installing by clicking Apply. You can uncheck Run after installation if you wish to manually enable it later; otherwise DSM will automatically add Audio Station to your Main Menu after the installation is complete.

Return to top

3. How to use Audio Station

• In this section, we will guide you through the user UI and the playback function of Audio Station.
• The Audio Station UI is divided into 3 sections: Audio Source, Music Browser and the Music Player.
• To use your Audio Station, you will need to put your music files under the music folder, or assign your choice of music source folder mentioned in the next section.

Audio Source

1. On the right side of Audio Station you can choose from a variety of audio sources.
2. Library: This is the music stored in your DiskStation. Any audio files in your Music folder and any other indexed folders will be recognized. You can choose to list them as All Music, By Folder, By Album, By Artist, By Genre, Random 100 or Recently Added.

3. Playlist: You can see your own personal playlists or shared playlists created previously listed here.

4. Internet Radio: You can find free radio stations on SHOUTcast^TM and RadioIO as our default internet radio provider. If you have an internet radio station link you would like to listen to, just click on Add Radio Station and enter the name, description and the URL of the radio station, it will then be added to your User defined list of internet radio. You can also drag the radio stations from the music browser to My favorite, or drag them to a playlist you’ve created for easy access.

5. Media Server: Audio Station can browse and play audio files on other DLNA-certified media servers on the local area network.

Music Browser

• In the middle you can see all the playable files from the source you have selected. There are 3 types of viewing styles that you can choose to browse your music library.

1. List: This is the first button from the left. The items are organized in a list.

2. You can select which info columns to show from the top, or use the filter box to search for specific items.

3. Icon: This is the button in the center. The items are presented in the form of icons and artworks included in the audio file’s directory or tag.

4. Cover Flow: This is the rightmost button. All icons and artworks appear using cover flow, creating a nice visual style to browse your library. Note that you can use this view only by selecting By Album or By Artist audio sources.

5. While browsing your media library, you can always go back to your last location by selecting the Up arrow on the top of music browser, or any of the path names to go back to a previous directory.

6. You can also edit music information by right-clicking on an audio file and select Edit music tag, a window will appear listing the information contained in the file.

7. From the music browser you can add songs into the playback queue. You can either drag the items to the queue list on the right.

8. Or, right-click on the items and select Add selections to queue or Add all to queue if you want to add the whole list of music to queue.

Music Player

1. In the right you can see the music player and the playlist queue in the bottom. You can Play/Pause, Next song, Previous song, Stop, adjust the volume, Shuffle On/Off, or change the repeat option (No repeat, repeat the playlist or repeat one song). Right click on the playlist queue for more options.

2. You can minimize the player by clicking on the Switch to mini player at the top right of music player.

3. The player will minimize to a simplified UI, letting you work on other tasks while still maintaining control over your music playbacks.

Return to top

4. Configure Audio Station

To use your Audio Station, you will need to put your music files under the music folder, or assign your choice of music source folder.

Under this section, we will take you through the steps of configuring Audio Station. You can:

1. Specify your music library folder
2. Edit settings
3. Create playlists
4. Select playback mode

Specify your music library folder

1. Open Control Panel from your main menu.

2. Select Media Indexing Service under Application Settings.

3. Under Indexed Folder, you can see the default folder for Music files is Music, which means Audio Station will automatically search for any audio files stored in this folder, and create a media library. If you have music stored somewhere else and want to add them to your music collection, choose Create.

4. Now you can add your own music folder for Audio Station to look for audio files. Click on Select to choose your folder. You should also uncheck the Photo and Video under File Type since we are only indexing music files here. After you are done, press OK.

5. Remember to click on Save for the changes to take effect. Now you can start using Audio Station!

Edit settings

1. There are 2 settings in Audio Station: setting up Audio Station feature Privileges for each user and Options.
2. Go to Audio Station > Settings > Privileges. You can setup which features are available to users.
3. USB/UPnP renderer mode: You can play music from an external USB/UPnP-compliant device.
4. UPnP Browsing: You can browse other DLNA/UPnP certified media servers on the network.
5. Manage Playlist: The ability to edit shared playlists.
6. Edit Music Tag: The ability to make changes to music tags.

7. Go to Audio Station > Settings > Options. There are 2 settings you can change.
8. Enable music download: Determine if user can download songs from the Audio Station directly.
9. Do not search for UPnP renderers: Determine if Audio Station should search for other media servers on the network.

Note: You have to restart Audio Station for the setting changes to take effect.

Create playlists

You can organize your favorite songs into playlists to access your music more easily. You can either create a Personal Playlist which is only viewable by you, or a Shared Playlist which is accessible for everyone using Audio Station on this DiskStation NAS. There are several ways you can create a playlist.

1. Go to Audio Station > Playlist > New Playlist.

2. Enter a name for your newly created playlist. If you want to save it as a Shared Playlist, check Add as shared playlist.

3. Go to Audio Station, and select New Playlist from Personal Playlist menu, or Shared Playlist menu.

4. You can save your current playing queue into a playlist. Just right click on any song in the queue and select Save playing queue.

5. You can also create a smart playlist to look up songs based on your search criteria. Go to Audio Station > Playlist > New Smart Playlist. You can experiment with the different variables and search criteria in order to achieve desired result.

6. If you want to add songs to an existing playlist, simply drag the songs from the library onto the playlist.

Select playback mode

There are 3 different playback modes for Audio Station: Streaming Mode, Media Renderer and USB Mode.

1. Streaming Mode is the normal playback mode which music will stream to the computer you are using right now.

2. You can only choose USB Mode when you have a USB speaker connected to the DiskStation. Under this mode you can stream music directly to your USB speaker or stereo devices connected to the audio dock of Synology Remote (sold separately).
3. Under Media Renderer mode you can stream music to other DLNA/UPnP-compliant devices in your local network. You can choose different devices in the drop down menu below the playback control panel.

Return to top

2013-04-10 17:35:32