iTunes 10 on NAS
iMAC, Mac OS X (10.6.4)
iMAC, Mac OS X (10.6.4)
Crashammer wrote:
Can someone confirm that iTunes 10 will work on NAS
and how would I move the library?
I'm a relative newcomer to the MAC, but had been using iTunes previously on a Windows machine with all the iTunes files local. Never had any issues. I now have my MAC Book Pro connected to a DLINK DNS-325 with 2x2T drives configured for RAID 1. I had numerous issues after first configuring iTunes to use the NAS. Some of this may have been user error. But this weekend, after reading through a number of posts I "cleaned things up". By that I mean I created a fresh media folder on the NAS, keeping the library files on my local drive. Once it was working I removed my previous media folder and its contents on the NAS as well as the media folder on my local drive that had been created and had some albums in it. I also set the advanced preferences to indicate the NAS for my media folder. I was confident that I had a clean system. Since then I have confirmed some bugs (IMO) in iTunes that make it difficult to use NAS.
1. iTunes will change the advanced preference for the media location to the local drive without informing / warning the user. I'm not sure when it happens exactly, but suspect it might be when it can't read the NAS for some reason (e.g. the NAS is not being responsive). This just happened to me, a couple of days after my clean up effort.
2. iTunes is "too" good at finding / creating media directories. For example, finding one even if it is renamed and in the trash can. This happened to me while I was cleaning up and testing. iTunes will also create a new media folder locally if one does not exist. One might call these features, but when the program doesn't inform the user it is doing so, I think it's a bug.
I think this behavior is what ended up getting me screwed up previously (with music in my NAS media folder as well as a local media folder. Resultant ! songs and a lot of frustration.
I don't know if fixing the above solves all NAS issues with iTunes, but it might go a long way.
Another observation that I can't say is an iTunes issue per say. I use the third party TuneUp program to (primarily) manage my album artwork. With my NAS configuration, adding artwork for an album hangs up iTunes pretty significantly (can't scroll the music list or anything for a minute or two). I'm going to follow up on the TuneUp support group on this one. But if anyone can share details or point me to a link to explain where album artwork is stored in might shed some clue as to the root cause.
Good luck to all the iTunes NAS users!
iTunes 10 on NAS