I have recently bought an ND5XS. It won’t connect to my existing WD NAS drive, so I am happy to buy a new external drive. Can anyone recommend a suitable USB drive or external hard drive and the pros and cons of USB versus external hard drive… I see various ones listed on John Lewis website.
Try a Samsung T5
M.
You really need a proper NAS. It’s a bit of a learning curve to set one up with a server, but once done, it all falls into place and just works. A USB drive will do nicely to back up the NAS, but that’s about all.
The streamer won’t connect to a NAS directly. You need a Media Server running on the NAS and it’s this what the ND5 will see.
I’ve used Plex on a WD NAS and it worked but their are better options.
You can connect a USB stick to the ND5XS ,I used to have a few 64GB with various , playlists , albums etc. Larger USB drives won’t work unfortunately .
You need to enable Twonky on the WD. The ND5 XS will then connect to that.
(Twonky is the UPnP/DLNA Media Server that WD use.)
Thanks for all the suggestions. Twonky is installed on my WD NAS. The ND5XS does connect OK, but it claims “No contents Shared”. I have been doing lots of reading up and will try changing to WD’s DLNA server on my NAS.
That suggests that you don’t have the music files in the right place on the NAS drive, they need to be put into sub-folders of the Public/Music folder (created by Twonky).
Have you enabled Twonky on your WD NAS and configured it ?
To do this you should type your NAS drives Network name or IP address into your web browser and select Settings/Media. There you should see a check box to enable Twonky.
After doing this Twonky will scan your NAS for all media files. You should be able to see the filepath/filenames during this scan and the 3 media folders (music, videos and photos).
Click on the “>” next to “Twonky Service” and you will see a list of devices
and their MAC and IP addresses. You need to identify your ND5XS on this list and make sure that the “Block” check box next to it is not ticked.
Once the scan is completed you can log into Twonky’s config page using your web browser at the web address “https:// followed by the I.P. address of your nas” then “:9000/config”
You can then set up Twonky’s configuration i.e. what types of media it should serve and to which devices.
There should also be a menu to the side with an option to browse your media library.
Is that a limitation of the original ? Fairly certain a larger USB device would work on an ND5 XS2 - wonder which the OP bought.
Yes, the USB input of the older streamers had limited functionality. The new versions work with larger drives, and support metadata so that you can briwse files properly.
my nd5xs is from 2017, I already have a sandisk 128gb usb stick from the beginning and that works without problems.
Hi, great instructions. I can just about get my head around it now and have more or less got it working. Yes, Twonky was enabled, but hadn’t scanned my media files and the media files thus were not shared. Embarrassingly I work for the world’s biggest hardware and software company and still find this stuff taxing.
Glad I could help and that you’ve made progress getting Twonky working.
Since affordable 1 TB usb sticks are available: would these work directly connected to a NDX 2 and would the soundquality differ from using an upnp or roon server?
On the new streamers you can use USB hard drives as well as memory sticks. The built in server will see them and play from them, so you may well find that a NAS is not required. I can’t vouch for the sound quality of USB on the NDX2, but generally on Naim streamers I’ve found it to sound much the same as UPnP from a NAS.
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