iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Ok, here's an odd situation.

I have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive on my home LAN.

It's set to power down after it's been running for a few minutes without any activity, the next time you try to access the drive it takes a couple of seconds to wind back up and get going again, but that's fine by me.

So.....

Whenever I start iTunes it seems to take a few seconds to get going, until recently I'd thought nothing of this, but then I realised that every time I started iTunes the NAS woke up and when it was finally up and running iTunes would start properly.

It appears that every time I run iTunes it's attempting to access my NAS.

I've checked that all the various networking options are switched off in iTunes, it's not looking for anything, and the iTunes folder is stored on a partition on the fixed drive (not on the NAS). The NAD path isn't in any of the settings for iTunes.

I'm a little mystified - anybody got any ideas what's going on?

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

only thing i can think of is an invisible setting that it scans all drives on start up of the prgram

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

That's what I thought, but I'll be damned if I can work out what it is.

Considered sniffing the network traffic and watching what's sent out as it starts, but I don't expect I'll be able to do anything about it even if I do :erm:

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

I don't know anything about iTunes specifically, but have you mounted your NAS as local drive like here

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

I have mounted the drive, but the iTunes library isn't on it.

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

No, but when iTunes starts up it probably scans/touches your local drives, it can't tell whether its local or not as XP acts as bridge between local and network.

Try unmounting it as a local drive but leave it on the network

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Ah, ok - I see what you're saying now.....

I wonder why it would do that though?

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Its Apple :p:

Its probably something to do with its indexing engine. To make the searches nice and quick it does background indexing.

Will iTunes allow you to access via Samba? Like this: \\nascomputername\music\folder

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Dunno, but the 'nascomputername' wouldn't help, it's not on the NAS.

If I browse through IE/firefox I will be able to browse to the music folder because it's on the local machine.....

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

what does itunes do when u turn the NAS off?
also does the NAS have any media files on it?

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Don't know, I'll try powering it off completely this evening and then start iTunes.

The NAS is holding pictures, office documents, and applications, there aren't any media files on there at all (or at least, none that I remember storing on there :erm:).

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

what make NAS is it?
some are very clever and go off looking for things they can talk to.

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Ok, if I start iTunes with the NAS completely powered off iTunes starts immediately.

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

ok well its 2 things.
itunes looking on the nas for a song
or the nas looking for itunes to talk to does it have a itunes server (or any media server) funtion?

perhaps delete everything from ur itunes list and then add them again making sure you dont add anything from the NAS

are u sure there isnt an option in itunes to detect and wake up UPNP devices?

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Nope, nothing set in the NAS look for anything - at the time this happens the NAS is actually on standby, it's also such a basic one it probably doesn't even know iPods exist :D

iTunes not looking for media on the NAS either, I recreated the library from scratch a couple of weeks ago and all the media is definitely on the local drive.

Must just be iTunes looking at mapped drives like punky said, that's all it possibly can be - which means it's probably impossible to fix without unmapping the damn drive.....

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

dont map the drive and just have a short cut to it using \\robmnas\share or something..
mapped drives are old hat these days :)
you could always try mapping it to another drive letter and see what happens.

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Could do that, but the shares on the drive are ptotected by username/password combinations. The drives are mapped at boot (once the network adaptors are up and ok) by a script that maps the NAS to a given set of drive letter allocations, supplying usernames and passwords as it goes.

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

fair enough.

with the nas in standbye and mapped what happens if you add the same songs to say..winamp or windows media player?

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Nothing, I can open Winamp/Media Player/VLC/Media Player Classic or any other media player that I choose and it doesn't touch the NAS.

This must be something specific to iTunes.

I think I'll see if I can find an Apple support forum and ask if anybody else has come across it.

I think I've only noticed it because I allow the NAS to drop into standby mode, rather than leaving it powered on all the time.

Thanks for the help :tu:

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

what fun!

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Is the Bonjour service running? Bonjour is Apple's non-compatible equivalent of UPnP, and is used by iTunes to look for any wireless devices it can access, or for other iTunes libraries.

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Nope, set to manual and stopped.

Re: iTunes Accessing NAS?
 

Bang goes my suggestion that maybe the nas firmware had Firefly (formally mt-daapd) then.

even if it did with bonjour disabled Itunes shouldn't find it anyway (or at least thats what i understand to be the case, may be wrong)