How can I share music folder on Windows with Ubuntu?

[Liqidmetal]

I am a new user of Ubuntu or any Linux based OS.

My problem is I have a shared drive sitting on top of a windows 7 machine which I have been using as our networked media centre.

This has worked well within a purely windows network environment but due to an aging laptop, I installed Ubuntu to extract some decent computing back.

I love the way Ubuntu works on my laptop!, slick and smooth and fast, from restart to login takes only 2 mins max, the same machine could take 8 mins when loading win 7.

So I am keen to use it as often as I can. One of the things I use the laptop - other than work, is to surf and listen to music.

All my music (70GB) of it is in the windows drive.

I have mounted the win 7 network drive in files and have book marked it. I can open the drive and see the many sub-folders of artistes and their respective albums and their tracks.

I can load the drive in Rhythmbox, and I can see all the music tracks, I can play the tracks, but I hear the start of the track for less than a second and then silence. The progress indicator shows something is being played as the seconds count up and the bar moves along but no sound.

So I loaded Banshee - Banshee can see the folder but wants to import all the tracks to the local drive (I have less than 2GB on my local machine) so this is not an option.

I loaded VLC and again it can see the mounted drive but will not populate with the music.

In win 7 I used media monkey and that worked brilliantly (so did a few others like Jaangle). In Ubuntu I cannot find anything that is like media monkey.

Help what am I doing wrong? How can I solve this. Many Thanks.

[Liqidmetal]

wow, not one reply!!

I have tried every thing and nothing works!!

OSX to Windows also uses samba and it was never this hard to get itunes playing music from a window's share!

It is a real downer that ubuntu developers have not developed a way of making the wondows shares in nautilus visible to the software like audacious etc.

Rhythmbox does see the window's share but a bug in the software stops it playing the tracks properly.

Come on Canonical get your act togther! Please.