Windows Home Server Music Sputtering Issue

[Jason Dunn]

This likely doesn't impact many of you, but I wanted to share it anyway: if you're using Windows Home Server on a machine that you built yourself, you may have encountered an issue where listening to music using Windows Media Player 11 results in random pausing in the music - and it's inconsistent enough to make it really hard to track down. I've been running Windows Home Server for almost a year now, and quite like it, but that one issue was irritating enough to force me to stop using it for media streaming (it was causing frustration for my wife). There have been some very long discussion threads about it in the WHS forums, but the WHS team has thus far been unable to track it down. It seems to be isolated to home-built WHS boxes, not the commercial packages from HP and others. My "work around" was to use Foldershare to copy all 80 GB of my music from my media computer (not the WHS) to my wife's computer, and use Windows Media Player 11 to play it all locally. Talk about an ugly kludge!

Two weeks ago, I decided to switch my wife over to the Zune software for listening to music (more on that topic later from me), and guess what? Playing directly off the shared WHS drive, I saw zero problems - I've streamed music off it day after day, on multiple systems, and never had a problem with the music pausing. I don't know how or why this is, but it works and I'm suddenly much happier with my Windows Home Server.

[Jason Dunn]

This likely doesn't impact many of you, but I wanted to share it anyway: if you're using Windows Home Server on a machine that you built yourself, you may have encountered an issue where listening to music using Windows Media Player 11 results in random pausing in the music - and it's inconsistent enough to make it really hard to track down. I've been running Windows Home Server for almost a year now, and quite like it, but that one issue was irritating enough to force me to stop using it for media streaming (it was causing frustration for my wife). There have been some very long discussion threads about it in the WHS forums, but the WHS team has thus far been unable to track it down. It seems to be isolated to home-built WHS boxes, not the commercial packages from HP and others. My "work around" was to use Foldershare to copy all 80 GB of my music from my media computer (not the WHS) to my wife's computer, and use Windows Media Player 11 to play it all locally. Talk about an ugly kludge!

Two weeks ago, I decided to switch my wife over to the Zune software for listening to music (more on that topic later from me), and guess what? Playing directly off the shared WHS drive, I saw zero problems - I've streamed music off it day after day, on multiple systems, and never had a problem with the music pausing. I don't know how or why this is, but it works and I'm suddenly much happier with my Windows Home Server.

[TonyR]

I've had a home built Windows Home Server for a while now, and I have never run into any issues with streaming music through WMP11. Maybe this will be something addressed in the upcoming service pack. I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to jump on that beta patch not knowing if it will make my server explode.