Comments on: iTunes and Network Attached Storage

By: shacker

shacker — Sat, 10 May 2008 06:17:08 +0000

Can’t easily test those combinations, sorry.

By: mneptok

mneptok — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:35:34 +0000

Ew.

I wonder if the abstraction ickiness extends across protocols. Same behavior for NFS or CIFS/Samba?

By: shacker

shacker — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:28:39 +0000

Result of same experiment at work: Can’t create dirs foo and Foo to an HFS+ formatted volume over AFP. Also can’t create them via CLI.

By: shacker

shacker — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:51:03 +0000

@mneptok: Just did a little test with an Interesting result. With an ext2 volume mounted via AFP I cannot create both folders “Foo” and “foo” via the Finder, but I can create both from the shell. Both folders then appear and behave normally from the Finder. So there’s definitely some weird abstraction going on — the Finder prevents it even on a supporting filesystem, but then also respects the situation if it already exists.

I’ll try a similar experiment later today with a networked HFS+ volume.

By: mneptok

mneptok — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:17:00 +0000

I’d be interested in how an OSX install on case-sensitive HFS+ deals with this issue. Does the kernel then automagically start handling case-sensitivity across mounts?

The fact remote shares are mounted case-insensitive by OSX is a bit daft, considering the variegated filesystem types you might expect.

By: jer@nyquil.org

jer@nyquil.org — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:40:22 +0000

It’s also possible to mount your ext fs with flags that make it not differentiate between case. I don’t recall what those flags are, but I had to do it a couple years back to fix a similar problem.

What’s happening is that iTunes is just blindly creating dirs based on track info. In a non-case-sensitive filesystem this isn’t a problem, so if you make your filesystem not sensitive (after fixing all theirs and files, of course, the problem shouldn’t occur again.

Not exactly ideal. Another option would be to store them on a vfat partition. In fact, rsyncing them over to a vfat partition might just clean things up for you, come to think of it…

By: shacker

shacker — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:12:54 +0000

mnep, I like it. Another good suggestion.

By: mneptok

mneptok — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:01:46 +0000

IMO, the correct solution is to mount the remote share, then:

ln -s /path/to/remote/music ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music

This symlinks the directory iTunes auto-creates in “panic mode” to your actual remote music library location.

HTH.

By: shacker

shacker — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:49:48 +0000

Hrm, cool idea PJ. I know there was some talk of using sparseimage as a way to use Time Machine against a non-Apple NAS – can’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t work for this purpose too.

By: David H.

David H. — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:56:51 +0000

Hmmm...maybe I'm glad I manage my music collection & the loading & unloading of tracks onto various iPods with Amarok under Linux ;) Linux Mint to be exact - an Ubuntu derivative with a lovely & well thought out interface...

By: PJ Doland

PJ Doland — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:57:51 +0000

Have you thought about creating a .dmg file on the NAS, putting your music on that, then mounting it automatically at boot?

If you make it a sparse image, it should be able to grow with your collection. You’ll also be able to set the volume format to:

Mac OSX Entended (Journaled)

I don’t know if this will solve your problem, but it might be worth a shot.