Transfer Music from NonFunctioning ReQuest to MMS

Owned by Michele Masiello
Jul 02, 2020
3 min read

If the ReQuest system is not functioning, these instructions may be used to attempt to transfer the music from the physical hard drive to the MMS.  

If your ReQuest system is functional, you DO NOT need to use these instructions and instead may use a simple file copy from ReQuest to the MMS server.  A script is available in our downloads area to facilitate this process.

Due to an issue with ReQuest .wav files, you may hear an audible pop at the end of each transferred ReQuest track when played on an MMS.  If this is the case, please reference the article on the AudioRequestFixer to fix the files after they have been successfully transffered to the MMS music share.

To set this up, you'll need a USB drive at least 1 GB in size and a Windows computer to prepare the USB drive with. Any brand of either should do. You will also need an external hard drive to USB adapter. All ReQuest hard drives we've seen here have been IDE/PATA drives, so the adapter must be compatible with that connection. Something like this should do: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Adapter-Converter-Optical-External/dp/B002OV1VJW. We have to use a Linux based recovery environment because the ReQuest system is Linux based and (without extensive tweaking) Linux is the only operating system that can read both ext3 (common Linux filesystem) and NTFS (default Windows filesystem).

Download the zip file from the bottom of this page: http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

  1. Follow the instructions on this page: http://www.hirensbootcd.org/usb-booting/

  2. Using the same Windows computer as before, reboot the computer and boot from the USB drive.

  3. It will present a menu of boot options. Using the arrow keys and the Enter key, select the 'Linux based rescue environment'

  4. A sub menu asking for boot options will appear. Select the top option 'Start'.

  5. Once booted, insert the external drive for copying the music to and the ReQuest drive through the adapter via USB to the terminal. It is important to do this after the system is booted already, or you may end up booting off the ReQuest drive, which almost certainly will not work.

  6. In the bottom left, next the sparkling disk icon, there is a white drive icon, not unlike the mounted drive icon on Mac OS X. Click that white icon.

  7. It should bring up a file system explorer as well as a mounted drive manager.

  8. Using the mounted drive manager, mount the volumes that represent the external and ReQuest drives.

  9. In the file system explorer, navigate to the root of the ReQuest drive.

  10. In that directory, you should see a folder called MP3.

  11. Copy that folder to the external drive.

  12. Shut the computer down and remove all USB drives. To shutdown, click the sparkling drive icon in the lower left corner and select Log Out. Select shutdown and click ok.

  13. Reboot into Windows.

  14. Reinsert the external now containing the extracted ReQuest content.

  15. I highly recommend grooming the metadata of all of this content, as the ReQuest media storage process is not particularly friendly towards metadata continuity.

  16. Once groomed, manually add that content to the server via the MMS's network shares (see below for access instructions), sync it to the MMS using our sync tools (available on the Firmware tab of the server's web configuration), or put it on a NAS drive and point the MMS at that network location (configured at the bottom of the Content tab on the server's web configuration).

The Music share is for content you'd like to add to the server manually without any synchronization client. It can be deleted at any time, at your leisure. Content stored in these shares is accessed in place and is not pulled into the MMS's internal file system so any changes you make to files stored there are detected by the server within 20-30 seconds and the internal database is updated.

To access these shares from Windows:

  1. Open My Computer

  2. In the address bar, enter \\192.168.1.214 where you replace that IP address with that of your server (you can also use the name of the server, i.e. \\MIRAGE-1 or \\MMS-2)

  3. Open either the Pictures or Music share.

  4. Copy the content of your choice to the appropriate share as you would any other file.

To access these shares from Mac:

  1. From Finder, open the Go menu

  2. Select Connect to Server....

  3. In the server address field, enter smb://192.168.1.214 where you replace that IP address with that of your server. You can use a name as with the Windows instructions, but I do recommend using the IP from Apple devices, as they seem to have some difficulty handling local DNS resolution

  4. If prompted for credentials, please select the Guest option

  5. Select the share you would like, and copy the content of your choice to the appropriate share as you would any other file.