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iTunes 10 on NAS

I am buying a Netgear NasReady drive and want to move my iTunes 10 library to the NAS drive. I have read several forums that say iTunes 10 does not work on NAS. Can someone confirm that iTunes 10 will work on NAS and how would I move the library?

iMAC, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Oct 8, 2010 4:44 AM

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8 replies

Oct 8, 2010 5:41 AM in response to Crashammer

Crashammer wrote:
Can someone confirm that iTunes 10 will work on NAS


it should.

and how would I move the library?


two options:

(a) with the NAS mounted on your desktop, drag the entire iTunes folder (not just the iTunes media folder) to the NAS.

when the copy process has finished, launch iTunes while pressing option on your keyboard. when prompted, click on +choose library+ and select the iTunes folder you just moved to the NAS.

in order for iTunes to copy newly added content to it, go iTunes > preferences > advanced and point +iTunes media folder location+ to the NAS.

(b) with the NAS mounted on your desktop, go iTunes > preferences > advanced and point +iTunes media folder location+ to the NAS.

next, iTunes > file > library > organize library > consolidate files.

this will copy your media files to the NAS.

either way, when the files have been copied over, you could delete the contents of the iTunes music folder on your startup disk to make room.

also, you ought to make sure the NAS is mounted on your desktop before launching iTunes next time.

J GG

User uploaded file

Oct 9, 2010 7:51 AM in response to Crashammer

I am not sure that playing music off a NAS is possible in iTunes 10.

I just got a DroboFS and I have been trying to get iTunes to run music of the NAS for the past 8 hours unsuccessfully. I have followed lots of different posts, threads and videos with no success.

I can get the music onto the NAS. I can even get itunes to recognize the music there and play it. The problem is every time you reboot the computer, itunes defaults to the local drive for music. If I go into preferences, advanced and change the media folder, it will recognize the nas music again. Reboot the computer, it goes back to the local drive.

I moved the music to the nas two different ways on 2 different occasions. I did it once as suggested above (which is also how the apple articles tell you how to do it) and I have done it by manually moving music. Neither way has been successful.

Dec 3, 2010 5:25 AM in response to buglis

Same here, i have a network storage where i keep my data also my music. Adding music files from a samba share connected to my mac it takes forever and itunes becomes unresponsive. This issue is from version 8 but now with version 10 is worst.
Please APPLE with all the money we put in your bank accounts listen our payers and make us live and work better!!!

Jul 25, 2011 6:51 PM in response to LinuxGFX

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

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