From Roon’s perspective is there any difference accessing music on a server if the sever is mapped to a drive letter vs providing the network path?
On Windows, the two mechanisms are nearly identical. The only real difference is that Roon will hang onto the windows share credentials and re-authenticate automatically on future runs. In both cases, the native SMB support built into the Windows OS is used.
On Mac, they are a little bit different. If you choose network sharing, Roon will make its own independent connection to your network share using a built-in library that speaks SMB. This has some disadvantages–the library we use isn’t capable of doing real-time change detection. On the other hand, you would be completely insulated from OSX’s sometimes weird auto-mounting behavior.
We may change the Mac to use the OS mechanism eventually, especially now that their SMBv2 protocol support is finally mature and performant in the last OS version or two–the lack of real-time watching is a lame limitation in my view.
FWIW, I have found that connecting the share via OSX and an SMB address to be more stable and better performing that connecting to the same NAS via the standard AFP addressing method used as standard in OSX Mavericks 10.9 and before
Not alone was using AFP slower, but also Roon would “lose connection” to the NAS…and the number of Albums would continuously fluctuate between 0 and xxx as if the connection was being lost
Yeah, AFP is awful and seems to be barely maintained at Apple these days. They’ve put a lot more recent effort into doing first-class SMBv2 support in the past few years, and that’s the direction where it seems they’re going.
No-one should use AFP for anything, ever, if SMBv2 is an option. Apple can’t kill it because compromising backwards compatibility is nasty for them, but we can certainly eradicate it from our lives 
The disappearing albums thing is an AFP bug. We’re aware of it, but not a way to fix it–from our perspective, the files simply disappear. We can’t figure out how to distinguish that situation from files being legitimately deleted because at the system call level, the two situations look identical.
About 95% sure that OSX 10.10 Yosemite uses SMB as the default connection method to NAS shares…replacing AFP which has been used in OSX for many years now
i.e. CIFS is NOT being used in Yosemite {as the default]
Just for info
This is just terminology confusion–CIFS is part of SMB. When I say “CIFS2” I mean “the subset of the SMBv2 standard that pertains to networked filesystems”.
I’m going to edit my post to match the Apple marketing materials and start calling CIFS2 SMBv2 instead. It should reduce any further confusion on this point.
I’ve previously used SMB on MAC successfully, but am trying ISCSI instead. Will not Roon not see files in a NAS folder mounted via ISCSI?
Edit: I’ve answered this myself. Works fine with NAS as ISCSI target and Mac Pro as initiator using Atto software. My only problem was forgetting how to get Roon to look at a local drive for the Library…