Failed Attempt at an iTunes Server
If you have been reading this site you know that I recently set up a NAS. A lot of NAS devices have built-in iTunes Media Server functionality, which makes sense as a NAS is an obvious place to store your music (most people have at least a few gigabytes these days...).
As you probably guessed, I did this with my NAS and I was immediately disappointed with the results. iTunes Server is extremely limited and while it can play music (the most important function) that is about it. You cannot drag songs into playlists or get them to play easily on your iPhone/iPod (this ability is tied to playlists). Also, if you buy songs, you have to store them locally, and then move them to your server, (then the server has to scan them, which can be every 5 minutes, hourly, etc., before iTunes will update). To put it simply, songs on your server don't have the same accessibility or usability as songs in your Library.
My problems did not stop there though. Sometimes iTunes would see my NAS' iTunes Server and not let me access it (I gave me a weird error about a firewall issues that did not exist). Just today iTunes did not recognize my NAS, this means you have no way to access the music (even though I could get to my mapped drive through Windows). Even restarting iTunes did not help... restarting the NAS and/or computer would have probably done the trick. Also the music on the server is a bit slow to load initially. It will take a few seconds for iTunes to list all the tracks. This is a minor annoyance, but it's just one more thing between you and you music.
What does iTunes Server do well? Well most of the time it's automatically recognized by iTunes, so it's very easy to setup (at least with Windows, I'm guessing it's just as easy on a Mac). Sadly, that's all I can think of.
So today, after iTunes could not find my Server, I was done with the experiment. The solution was pretty simple, I just needed to change my iTunes Library folder to the folder where it live on the NAS using a mapped drive. So rather than the Library living on my C: I changed it to my Y:. I have a pretty substantial amount of music so it took a long time for iTunes to rescan the folder and organize it but afterwards I was all set.
It begs the question, why did I do an iTunes server in the first place? Well this is a feature on most nicer NAS devices so I wanted to give it a shot. It also lets more than one computer use that music. Finally, because of your limited permissions, it means that your music is blocked from iTunes' tampering (changing folders, converting file types, adding tracks to the library, etc.) Ultimately it just wasn't worth it though and I can't see an iTunes server being something that NAS owner would want to use.
To summarize all this: iTunes Server can only play music, that's it. If you want anything more, and you are storing your music on a NAS, you should map a drive and use that as your iTunes Library folder.
