Hello I'm looking to purchase a synology NAS and a Sonos play 5. I won't to transfer my iTunes libraries onto the NAS, is that possible? Also will i be able to switch between the two when i want to play on the Sonos?
Reason being i have an Apple Lossless Library and my main Library of mp3 music. Also i like to use my MacBook Pro as my main library for organising my music, is there a way of syncing my libraries to the NAS?
I have neither NAS or Sonos, but I have seen many posts here involving them.
Transferring library may be relatively easy if you have kept iTunes' default preferences settings. Copy the whole iTunes folder to the other drive, hold down the option/alt key while starting iTunes and when it asks to select a library select the iTunes folder on the other drive.
There's problems I remember reading about here. Of course I don't hear about situations where it works but I do see a fair number of problems involving NAS. Sometimes iTunes works with NAS but iTunes was not designed to work with non-Apple NAS so it is the luck of the draw. The main issue is something happens to the paths to the files and iTunes suddenly cannot find the files to which it is linking. This is worse where people have decided to move only media to the NAS but keep the main library files on the computer.
Recently there were posts about using Western Digital NAS iTunes servers which stopped working with iTunes 12.1 The library was no longer served and I guess it may be the iTunes upgrade broke the WD software and WD has to release an update.
I believe people prefer to undo iTunes settings to manage media. They do it their own way because Sonos doesn't work directly with iTunes, it just uses the media directly and the iTunes folder structure isn't the best presentation (normally you never see it). That is fine except with NAS, as I said earlier, iTunes may lose links to files. If files are arranged as iTunes likes the iTunes application can offer to fix broken links. If you are managing your own media it won't and if your links get broken you have to re-build your library yourself. If you do that you may end up losing ratings, play count, date added.
Two iTunes Libraries On NAS Drive & Sonos
