12-07-2006, 06:00 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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iTunes Questions from a Newbie
I decided to install iTunes and take it for a spin, to really use it, and see how it works. Initial installation was fast and simple, though the download size of 30 MB was a bit surprising (Quicktime is in there as well though). I declined to have it search for my music initially. After it loaded, I was impressed when I saw my network attached storage, a Maxtor Shared Storage drive, appearing in the list. I knew I had enabled the iTunes server functionality on it, so when I clicked on it in iTunes I was expecting to see a list of music. Instead, iTunes says "Loading LANDrive Music Jukebox" for several seconds (LANdrive is the name I gave it) then it simply pops back to the root library. I tried it several times, made sure that the NAS drive was configured properly, but no dive. I did a Google search and couldn't find any suggestions on what to try. Has anyone else seen a similar problem?
Giving up on the easy approach, I used the "Add Folder To Library" function to import music from the NAS drive manually over the network. It took perhaps 5-6 hours before it was finished indexing the songs, finding album art, and generating gapless playback profiles (I think that's what it said it was doing). What I didn't like was how during the initial scan (which took a couple of hours) the scanning window was locked - I couldn't use iTunes at all. Windows Media Player 11 is much smoother in this regard. Here's another problem I'm having: I've added music via the "Add Folder", but it doesn't seem to monitor that folder for new music. I added a new CD to the NAS drive, but it's been 30 minutes now and iTunes hasn't picked it up. I can find no option or setting related to folder monitoring - and in fact the help file has no mention of the word monitoring as it related to folders. So what am I missing here? How do you use iTunes with a NAS drive and have it scan for new music that you add?
The iTunes store is quite easy to use, though I haven't purchased any tracks yet - but how do you listen to samples from an entire album at once? So far it seems I have to double-click on each track one at a time, and there's no right-click functionality other than Copy. I don't know if it's a local problem with my ISP (my speed tests came back ok), but I'm also finding using the iTunes store very slow today - it's taking 20-30 seconds for every request to process and load a new page. Does the iTunes store have good days and bad days in terms of performance?
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