Here’s my issue. I have iTunes now on a NAS and it’s slow and for some reason not finding new files. I want to use a music library that I use for Roon on a usb drive in a folder called music attached to my rock as my itunes library as well. I can’t seem to find out how to do this. i DONT want to copy my songs from the NAS to the external. Is there a way to do this or an app to use so my external is not overwritten but to keep my playlists and ratings? Now, my iTunes library is a mess, because it’s full of missing songs and not adding new songs I add to my Roon hdd. I need iTunes for my phone in my car and my office. Thanks!
Any thoughts?
iTunes does not monitor for newly-added files. You need to explicitly choose File → Add to Library ... to get iTunes to recognize the new files. This has always been the case.
iTunes can use a remote SMB share as the location for its Library. (IIUC, that’s what you are already doing with the iTunes Library located on your NAS.) But you complained that this is slow. If that’s the case, I would not expect that switching to a different remote-mounted library would be an improvement.
If your iTunes Library is a mess, this will surely only make it worse. Remember, Roon does not embed metadata in the files. Rather, it keeps its metadata in a separate database — something totally invisible to iTunes.
Since
- Roon monitors for newly-added files, whereas iTunes doesn’t.
- Roon can use the embedded metadata in the files, whereas iTunes cannot use Roon’s ‘external’ metadata.
Clearly, your workflow should be in the other direction: add new files to your iTunes Library (with whatever metadata you want), and sync that Library with the music folder on your Rock (using rsync or whatever.
Many thanks!!