I love the VLC player (both win and android) but I'm sad it doesn't seem to work well with my favourite mediaserver: MediaMonkey. I'm strictly talking about audio now. When I ask for 'albums' VLC shows me a list of albums, but they are all 'empty'. However, when I search via 'composer', like I do for classical music, it shows me the albums alright - none of them 'empty'! (But this method is of course not useful for other types of music.)
A stop-gap way is searching 'folders', but there too the initial folder just shows 'empty'.
I think this is very odd behaviour (especialy the empty albums) but of course I can't know whether it's the fault of VLC or MM-server. Come to think of it, I don't really know anything about the standards for behaviour of 'dnla mediaservers'.
But I can't really put this question on the MediaMonkey forum either, since the MediaMonkey player has no such troubles at all! Unluckily for me, the MM-player doesn't 'cast' well to my ChromeCast Audio dongle, a task which VLC performs admirably well.
BTW, before you advise me to use a different mediaserver: I already tried a number of them (WMS, Plex, Kodi, Serviio, Universal Mediaserver and of course Videolan) but nothing comes even close to the functionality of MediaMonkey. At least for my purposes (accessing my collection of music, on which I spent a lot of time adding the correct metadata).
It's great that VLC allows browsing the folders on my mediaserver directly (bypassing a mediaserver) and it plays everything fine through the ChromeCast Audio. But already this 'folder view' is getting messy and I didn't even add most of my CD-rips. I really need a mediaserver and want to profit from all those metadata I so laboriously added.
So I'm kind of at a dead end here. I'd be most thankful for any advice.
mabel