Network visibility using NAS

[Mike Jones]

Hi all, 

I have a music player (Brennan B2) on which it has a NAS feature so that you can see the contents of the internal hard drive on your laptop. I have this switched on. There are about 1Gb of contents.
I have two Windows 10 machines that I wish to view the Brennan NAS folders from. I have SMB 1.0 Client switched on in the Windows featuon both and I can see a drive in the Windows Explorer > Network showing BRENNANB2 which is my music player. However it consistently says "This folder is empty". What can I try next to see my music player drive contents on both these machines please/ 

Incidentally If I try to move any file into the BRENNANB2 folder that I can see, I cannot do so, I get the no entry sign on the mouse icon.

Does that help?

Any network engineers who know what is going on here please?

many thanks

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Hi quant...

You are almost there I think (you can see "BRENNANB2" on your PC!)

Here are Paul (from Brennan's composite instructions), follow them to the letter and tell us if that fixes things.

Fred

---------------------------------

Here are some instructions for getting your B2 to show as a network device on your computer -

NAS mode using a Windows 10 computer:

On the B2:

• Make sure the B2 is connected to WiFi - displaying an IP Address - something like 192.168.1.127

• Using the front control go to the Maintenance menu and select Start NAS - the display will return to the clock and then show 'done' after a couple of seconds.

On your Win10 computer:

• In the 'Type here to search' box type - Turn Windows features on and off (you don't have to type all of this as you will be prompted by the computer).

• Click on 'Turn Windows features on and off'

• Scroll down to 'SMB1.0/CIFS File sharing support' and expand the section - click on the '+' box

• Select the second item - SMB1.0/CIFS Client - it may already be selected so no need to select again

• Click on OK.

On the Win10 computer:

• In the 'Type here to search' box type View network computers and devices

• Click on 'View network computers and Devices'

• BRENNANB2 should be displayed on the 'computer' line - if not wait a while (it can take a while to show the first time) and try refreshing the 'View network....' page.

• Double click on BRENNANB2 - a pop up panel will open

• Enter user name = root

• Enter password = brennan and click on OK

• The B2's 'music' folder will be shown - double click to open it - this can take a while as the computer needs to load all of the files on the B2's HDD.

• Once loaded a list of Artist folders will be shown

• Double clicking on an Artist folder will show the Album folder/s associated with the Artist

• Double clicking any Album folder will show the Tracks and Album Artworks

You can then edit these folders and files as you would any folders/files on your computer e.g. create new folders, copy and paste, cut and paste, rename, delete, etc.

You can also copy music from your computer (iTunes, etc) to the B2 whilst in NAS mode - make sure you maintain the correct Artist - Album - Track folder format so the music is correctly displayed on the B2.

Please note - any changes you make on the computer are local to the computer and must be transferred to the B2 by running Scan Disk - Settings menu - on the B2. If you leave the computer session without running Scan Disk, any changes will be lost.

Paul

Brennan Support.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[PMB]

Hi Quantum G,

If you click on BRENNANB2 do you then get asked for a 'user name' and 'password' (root and brennan respectively)? After entering these are you offered the 'music' folder?

Paul

Brennan Support.

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

How have you go on with this?

We do like to know :)

Fred

On Tuesday, 26 January 2021 at 22:19:27 UTC quant...@gmail.com wrote:

[Mike Jones]

Hi all,

I get to the part where I enter the username and password. This part I have done previously (correctly) so I am not asked this anymore.

Opening the BRENNANB2 folder I do not get the music folder appearing at all.

Just "This folder is empty"

I have folder the instructions to the letter

anything else I can try?

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Open "File Explorer" in Windows 10,

Click on "This PC"

Then Click on "Map network drive"

A new window will open

In the "Folder" box, enter the IP number of YOUR B2 unit thus

 \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\music

here the "x"s are your IP no.

Then hit return.

You should be prompted for the User Id and password again

"root" and "brennan".

Tell us how that goes, in "File Explorer" the "music" folder should now be visible.

Fred

On Saturday, 30 January 2021 at 11:14:51 UTC fred.w....@gmail.com wrote:

I got this in my personal email

------------------------------------

Hi all,

I get to the part where I enter the username and password. This part I have done previously (correctly) so I am not asked this anymore.

Opening the BRENNANB2 folder I do not get the music folder appearing at all.

Just "This folder is empty"

I have folder the instructions to the letter

anything else I can try?

-----------------------------------------------------

On Thursday, 28 January 2021 at 01:47:46 UTC fred.w....@gmail.com wrote:

[Mike Jones]

I now get this dialog. Network path was not found

[PMB]

Hi Quant...,

I saved this article some time ago - Fix Windows 10 Error code 0x80070035 The network path was not found - link - may be  helpful.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Are you using windows 10 home or pro?

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Paul, you link does not work. (not a link)

Fred

On Saturday, 30 January 2021 at 14:45:21 UTC PMB wrote:

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

here is one link 

https://thegeekpage.com/fix-windows-10-error-code-0x80070035-the-network-path-was-not-found/

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

If you have Windows 10 Pro

I have a fix that worked for me.

As you can probably tell this is a Windows (microsoft) issue, not a Brennan issue.

Fred

[PMB]

Hi Fred,

Thanks for posting the link to 'thegeekpage' - not sure what went wrong with my link.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[David Wheeler]

Hi All, here's a peculiar thing.  Not an actual problem, because everything plays properly, but I am intrigued.  Having made B2 my principal music source, I decided to gather some remaining odds and ends from my iTunes library, and the last of the pretty lo-fi old recordings that I had converted from old cassette tapes (remember those?).  They are all individual songs rather than albums, so I decided to use NAS to group them into made-up album names within the 'Various Artists' folder that holds a small number of compilation albums. I added the artist names after each track name, and also preceded each track name with 01, 02 etc to achieve a running order.

This all worked, but when viewed with the Web UI the tracks were each shown with a preceding header like ._1-11, ._1-12 etc. Attempts to play these resulted in a skip through them all until reaching the 'proper' track name, which would then play.  This happened after a disc scan too.  When I removed these tracks, nothing worked, so I deleted the remaining and started again.

The best way to illustrate this is the following screenshots, which show one of the  folders as I built it and viewed with NAS, and how it appears on the Web UI, and the other folder as it appears in the iPhone browser and in the iPhone App - this last being as expected.

The 2 folders do play properly, but I am not sure what is happening here, so would be interested in any ideas

all the best

David W

[Daniel Taylor]

It's apparent that you use a Mac computer.  It seems that Macs have companion files with a "._" preface.  I don't know what they're used for, and the B2 does not know what to do with them either.  I am not a Mac user, but I would think there should be some way to get your computer to include those companion files on the display with the other ones.  Then you can copy just the actual music files to the USB stick for Importing onto the B2.  In the case where the companion files come along for the ride, I think the Cleanup command (Maintenance menu) will take care of them.

[David Wheeler]

Thanks for that Daniel, seems like another example of why most of the proper techies I know hate Apple devices with a passion!  Some of their arguments I go along with, the major one being that strange things seem to happen when a user strays from the path and does something unexpected from a simple user.  However.

You may well be right, perhaps the thing to do is just construct 2 simple folders, copy them to a USB stick and import to B2.  Trying to do it the 'clever' way using NAS was perhaps a step too far when a Mac is involved!

thanks again

David W

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Guys,

Here is a fairly good description of what the '._' files are doing.  

"._" Files These invisible files are "resource fork" segments of files that are being created on the external volume. In Macintosh filesystems (HFS and HFS ) there is support for two types of file information: one is the resource fork, and the other is the data fork. The data fork will contain user-supplied information such as the text of a word document, and the resource fork will contain information about the document such as author, document-specific preferences, and other metadata.

In Mac OS X filesystems these forks are treated as one file, and appear as such; however, resource forks are not supported on many filesystems, including those used on Windows machines (SMB and NTFS). As such, when users copy files to these systems the resource fork can be lost. Therefore Apple has built a file-handling mechanism into OS X which automatically splits the resource and data forks into two files when copied to disks that do not support resource forks.

On Saturday, 13 February 2021 at 18:51:28 UTC Daniel Taylor wrote:

[Dennis]

Note that the Maintenance > Cleanup command will remove file which begin with ._

Cleanup Removes empty albums, hidden files and any files beginning with '._' (dot underscore). Run Settings->Scan Disk after.

[David Wheeler]

Hi all, and thanks for some helpful replies.  Peter's explanation of the 'dot underscore' prefix makes sense, and I shall try Daniel and Dennis's cleanup suggestion to see if that tidies things up on the interface displays.

The conclusion I am coming to from this episode is that copying music files from Mac to another computer is not the simple drag and drop I had hoped for, although this did work for me when using NAS to copy from B2 to a USB stick for car use.  I think I should be looking instead for an 'Export' command to 'Import' to B2.  That way perhaps the package of data is more likely to arrive at the receiving computer in a format understood by a non-Apple device.

Would that make sense guys?

cheers

David W

[Mark Fishman]

As Peter explained, macOS mainatins both a Resource fork and a Data fork in files that it creates or modifies. On an Apple file system -- HFS+ or APFS -- these two forks are contained inside the one file. On other filesystems -- and for a Brennan device only FAT32 is relevant here -- the two forks have to be separated out into two files, but when such a filesystem is viewed by an Apple device only one file is shown, because macOS knows the two pieces belong together.

Whether you copy over a network or to a USB-connected drive, as long as the destination is using a non-Apple filesystem you will get two files, to hold the two forks.

Once Upon A Time I read about something called "AppleDouble" format, which kept the two pieces in one file, but as I recall that was useful only if you were going to transfer the files to another Apple computer before attempting to use them. That doesn't apply in this case.

So it has nothing to do with drag-and-drop, and nothing to do with using a network connection. It has everything to do with the way that Apple stores information in/about a file, regardless of where it is stored.

If you are using Finder to look at files after you copy them, maybe turning on the display of hidden files will help: try Command-Shift-period.

On Sunday, February 14, 2021 at 8:38:56 AM UTC-5 David Wheeler wrote:

Hi all, and thanks for some helpful replies.  Peter's explanation of the 'dot underscore' prefix makes sense, and I shall try Daniel and Dennis's cleanup suggestion to see if that tidies things up on the interface displays.

The conclusion I am coming to from this episode is that copying music files from Mac to another computer is not the simple drag and drop I had hoped for, although this did work for me when using NAS to copy from B2 to a USB stick for car use.  I think I should be looking instead for an 'Export' command to 'Import' to B2.  That way perhaps the package of data is more likely to arrive at the receiving computer in a format understood by a non-Apple device.

Would that make sense guys?

On Saturday, February 13, 2021 at 2:20:56 PM UTC-5 peter....@gmail.com wrote: