iTunes help
Thursday, May 31st, 2007 - 9:57am
OK I have a NAS on my network and I want iTunes to get the music from that location and not mess with the structure or those files but store play list local to the PC.
I tried messing with iTunes to do this and so far I only been able to get iTunes to make a copy locally of my entire music library on the NAS or store the playlist on the NAS and for some reason rearange the files in a very bizzare way.
Any advice?
I don't think iTunes is equiped to deal with non-local storage very well. It was the only music manager I've used that could scan my samba share and import all the songs but as you said, as you add songs it does some funky things unless you manually do it anyway.
Because of this I still basically do everything manually and keep a decent/heirarchical folder structure. I do store playlists on the server (the playlist for each CD is in a folder named Playlists which is the actual shortcut that goes on my PCs desktops called Jukebox) but you can browse the share, add songs to the player and save 'custom' playlists locally.
The only thing I can think of that will do some of the things that you want is Slimserver, it's not a player but will stream to any player that can accept a stream.
Other than MS Home server (which isn't out yet and it's MS) I don't think there is yet a product even attempting to cater to those of us with dedicated music/media storage servers in terms of managing the 'whole enchilada'.
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I think there's an option in the library menu to tell it not to organize your files. Turn that off maybe?
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iTunes doesn't seem to be able to do that. It really, really wants complete control over the files. It's aggrievating.
I've been much happier with Windows Media Player. It plays just fine off of network shares, and afaik keeps the playlists and a copy of file metadata locally on the PC.
Yes I tired to turn off the iTunes organize files options and it did not seem to make much a difference.
I would just use Media Player as I actually feel the current version is better then iTunes but funny thing is on my Vista64 PC Media Player is having trouble reading from my samba share.
Vista by default only uses NTLMv2 so I had to modify the security policy to use LM also. Once I did this I could browse the samba drive, add files, copy files, and the like but Media Player can not play them and I found no way arround this.
iTunes can play them but can not seem to replicate Media Players functionality.
Fun Fun.
Don't use iTunes or Vista?
Sorry, I got nothing.
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On my NAS, I've got firefly installed on it. Firefly acts as an itunes server that runs on the NAS. You need to make sure the itunes on your desktop is set to look for shares, but after that, you can connect directly to that remote server.
FireFly
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I have one itunes store and 4 machines. I have all of them point to a G:\itunes\ directory to find the library, and then I map the share to G: on every machine. Works flawlessly. Only issue is that if you've got two machines moding the library at the same time, last one in wins the battle.
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Correct I can get that working fine but I want each machine to have different/seperate play lists. In fact I will take it even further and want each user account on each machine to have different play lists.
That is what I am trying to get iTune to do have different play list for each user but pulling from the same base library.
That's exactly what I do. Except the drive letter is M: (music, MP3, media)
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I think you have to do the shared library thing then.
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