Migrating Music Library to New NAS

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Level 1

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Migrating Music Library to New NAS

This question is for turingtest2! Thank you for providing the documentation located at Make a split library portable, however I am continuing to have some issues with making this work for a friend. I offered to help my neighbor out who has built an extensive playlist collection over the last 15 years in iTunes.

First and foremost, his iTunes collection is currently running on iTunes 7 with a Windows 7 computer. His music collection is currently hosted on a Western Digital MyCloud NAS. The collection was never mapped as a drive on Windows and was just accessible by UNC path (e.g. \\WDMYCLOUD\Public). From what I can tell, his .xml and .itl for the library are hosted on his desktop folder on the PC. Regardless, I've taken backups of the library with the most recent being a few days ago.

He came to me with help after running out of space and not knowing the best way forward to increase NAS space and allow for scalability into the future. We have since purchased a Synology NAS with additional drive bays to expand his RAID as he adds more music. We got the NAS onto the network, copied over all the data from the old Western Digital, and ultimately offline'd the old NAS. When everything was ready, I configured the Synology NAS the same exact way to see if we can avoid music library issues. We did the following:

Renamed the Synology hostname to be exactly the same as the old WD NAS
Set the same static IP for the Synology as the old WD
Confirmed the file paths for all music are exactly the same as we see in the Library XML
Made sure the Synology is not mapped with a drive letter to mimic the same behavior as with the WD

After launching iTunes again with the new system online, we found that songs could not be located in playlists and when I select the option to "locate", it would take me to the exact folder on the Synology the music is hosted. So... it seems that iTunes somewhat knows that everything is the same but fails for some reason.

After realizing this, we reverted our changes for the Synology briefly and brought the WD NAS back online. Surely enough, we relaunched iTunes and everything works as before. This is when I found your documentation on making a split library portable. After reviewing your document and seeing options 1-8, we came to these conclusions:

We could not attempt this option as the library files and the media were not "one unit" (the library files were on the desktop and the media files are on the WD NAS)
We could not do this as it was not an option - I'm not sure if this was an option available in iTunes 7. Correct me if I'm wrong.
We did not attempt this step mainly because the collection is about 4TB and was worried it would try to move all the data from the WD NAS back to my neighbor's PC.
We used this step when attempting steps 5 & 6.
We attempted moving those 5 files to the parent folder of the media folder on the Synology NAS and iTunes could still not locate the songs.
This is what we did in step 5 and used step 4 to choose an "alternate library".
At the moment, all music for the playlists are in a folder named "_music". I'd like some clarification if possible on this step... should the _music folder be renamed to "iTunes Media" and then we make sure the library files and the media files are just both in this folder?
We have not tried this yet because we ran out of time... to clarify, if we rename the folder that currently hosts the media files on the NAS (\\WDMYCLOUD\Public\_music) to (\\WDMYCLOUD\Public\iTunes) and we choose an alternate library on launch and point to the .itl/.xml within that folder, this should fix all the songs?

I plan to continue troubleshooting further once I can get a bit more insight and go back with a plan. Your help is greatly appreciated and am more than happy to answer any follow-up questions you may have.

Posted on Jul 7, 2025 09:35 AM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

277,723 points

Jul 7, 2025 10:09 AM in response to virdual

Hi,

Normally these steps would have done the trick:

* Renamed the Synology hostname to be exactly the same as the old WD NAS

* Set the same static IP for the Synology as the old WD

* Confirmed the file paths for all music are exactly the same as we see in the Library XML

* Made sure the Synology is not mapped with a drive letter to mimic the same behavior as with the WD

Since they haven't I suspect, like you, iTunes knows something has changed somehow and refuses to locate files even though they are where they are expected to be. This might be related to an issue another user had where his library knew what folders files were supposed to be in, but refused to connect to the files themselves: Apple Music on Windows is only syncing my… - Apple Community. Saldy that conversation appeared to stall before being fully resolved.

In your case it might be best to use iTunes to consolidate files to the new target folder rather than trying to get it to accept content you've previously copied over manually. In iTunes you should be able to select a group of tracks, then use File > Library > Consolidate files to copy just that batch to a new path, updating the references in the library as it goes. I would recommend backing up the existing .itl before you start, and set the new media folder to <UNC Path>\iTunes\iTunes Media, or alternatively <Drive Letter>\iTunes\iTunes Media so that you could, if needed, at a later date move the library files into the iTunes folder. I recommend you work in suitable sized batches rather than trying to do it all in one hit because of the size of the library. When you first tell iTunes that you have a new media path for it say no when it asks to consolidate so you can take charge. You'll need to think about how you break up the task, e.g. library as Songs sorted as say Album by Artist, pick a few thousand but pick complete albums/artists, then take note so you know where to begin the next batch.

Regarding the itemised points earlier option 2 isn't offered if the library is already using the newer layout which puts music in a \Music folder, nor is it available in iTunes 7. That feature came in with iTunes 9. More generally I'd suggest moving the library files around and renaming the media folder to iTunes Media when you have an external drive. On a NAS this is less likely to be a good move as accessing the library on the NAS is significantly slower then when it is on local storage.

tt2

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