music app that can handle lots of songs on a NAS without falling over?

[cutcopypaste]

I have recently acquired a Synology Ds214play based on high praises from all corners of the globe.

It's to replace my PC desktop which had a whole bunch of media stored on it but as a person who prefers Mac, didn't serve much other purpose. On the PC I tended to use Foobar2000 to quickly find/enqueue tracks. I also had iTunes w/ iTunes Match to sync my favourite stuff (my collection being larger than the 25k song limit)

I now have all the music (about 600GB) on my NAS and I want to be able to actually listen to it in a way that is somewhat enjoyable.

I'd like my library to update based on music added to the NAS without me having to manually refresh (like a Watch folder)

• The native Synology Audio Station App takes takes about 20 seconds to complete a search and has a pretty limited web interface on the Mac.
• Synology iTunes Media Server.. shows up in my itunes but immediately disconnects when I select my NAS library. May be reasonable, but looks like some patching is necessary for it to work on iTunes 12.1. When it was working (before last update I presume) it was taking about 1 minute to load the library and disconnecting with some regularity.
• I tried setting the mapped NAS folder as my iTunes library source, but it did nothing.
• I am currently manually copying all the networked music folders into a new iTunes library that will cause large problems when I'm not at home (i can relaunch iTunes to switch them which is not ideal but at least possible), BUT at the current rate will be done by mid month... which seems excessive
• I have tried adding the files to VOX to see if that will work at least on my laptop. Love the interface of the app.. quite slick! But so far the library has been loading for 30 hours and I'm not sure if it will be useful or performant when it's finished. I understand it will not auto update
• I tried Sonora.. there was no way to add a directory to it. I was not interested in adding 60,000 songs one by one.
• Plex media library is so far working best of the bunch. But it's search is a bit weird in how it shows results and its playlists/upcoming are very easily removed. Plus as a webapp I can't use my media keys to control it... and I would rather have a dedicated app.
• Currently loading it all up on the Mac version of Winamp, which has an option to watch a network drive. Great! But I tried to play a track and it became completely unresponsive and had to be force quit. HRM

Anyway. I'm curious to know if anyone else has had good luck with very large music libraries on Networked drives. So far I have just been extremeley frustrated.

 

[Attonine]

Synology 414j user here. Actually 2 of them. I simply have my iTunes media on them, but the library file on my MBP. I have set up the NAS drives to auto mount on restart. No problems whatsoever with either of them. Works as if all my iTunes media were on my MBP. As I use a laptop, and take it in and out of the house, I just need to remember to reconnect the NAS share and then launch iTunes otherwise iTunes doesn't find the media. I don't use the Synology iTunes server, I just don't need it. You do need to install the Synology media server though.

Here is a pretty thorough "how to" for a Synology NAS and iTunes. If it's the first time you've set something like this up, probably worth a read as there are some potential holes to fall down.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/12/how-to-offload-your-itunes-library-to-a-nas/

For the most part I stream my music to my Cyrus Stream XP QX streamer using the dedicated iOS app (cadence). Again, no problems whatsoever.

You could check the computer audiophile website and forums. Here you will be able to find lots and lots of alternative media players and reviews and users doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things with exactly your setup.

 

[cutcopypaste]

Thanks for the reply!

HRM.

I have got past the point where all my music is already on the NAS and to redo it would be a real pain. I don't really mind re-sorting it etc

BUT.. I have more music than Match will allow so I can't add all my music into iTunes. Also I don't have a computer with a single hard drive with enough free space to hold all of it (that went in the NAS...)

So maybe I'm SOL. I tried adding the NAS as an alternate library for iTunes and like I mentioned it was not seeming to pick up the files there / going extraordinarily slowly adding them by hand.

How do you keep the library up to date when you get new music? Add it automatically?

Thanks for the advice on where to look for more information..

 

[satcomer]

Just watch this video to use iTunes on a Synology device.

 

[cutcopypaste]

The problem w iTunes is it is horrendously slow with a library the size of mine and if I try to add the music from the NAS to a library on my macbook, it takes days.. and then if it gets interrupted (which it will bc I have to take my macbook out of the network) adds duplicates of all the files as they get re-added. And then I will have to toggle between libraries because i have iTunes match and more than the 25k song limit.

I've been trying to setup things like minimserver etc but have had no luck getting anything actually working.

Argh.