- Are my observations correct?
Yes.
- If yes, will Mac have realtime folder monitoring on a NAS?
There’s a workaround that you can use to get it working right now:
- Mount your network drive using the OS. You can set up the drive as a login item if you want it to be auto-mounted at startup.
- Configure Roon to watch the directory where the network drive is mounted
Obviously we’d prefer to have real-time watching built-in to the app on all platforms.
This inconsistency has arisen because the library that we use to make direct connections to Windows (SMB/CIFS) shares doesn’t support file/directory update notifications. There isn’t another sufficiently robust alternative that allows us to fully own the connection to the NAS and manage authentication the way we want to.
We may stop using this mechanism entirely and integrate with the OS-level implementation for CIFS volume mounting, but there are some technical complexities there that still need to be run down. We may also keep this as-is and make my above advice an FAQ entry. This is in flux at the moment.