On one side there is my music: All music is stored on a NAS in my home network. The NAS is connected to my WLAN router. In consequence of this it is not hosted by a Windows Operating System. On the other side there are all these wonderful music apps for Windows 8.1 – XBox music, Groove and so on. How can I listen my music with these Apps? In a beautiful world It just works: I add the NAS-music-directory to the music library of my Windows 8.1 tablet and it is ready to go. I can listen my music with XBox Music. Unfortunately this is not the case.
If the music is stored on a Windows hosted drive it seems to be no problem. Paul Thurott has written a post about it. But my music is not hosted by Windows. And there the problem begins. You can find a few posts which recommend to join the NAS-folder to the library by linking it with mklink. I have tried it on my environment and it did not work. An FAQ page for XBox Apps states: “If you have music stored on a network or network access storage (NAS) drive, note that the Music app currently only supports content stored on network shares hosted by Windows operating systems.” So I think it is clear: It just does not work.
One alternative is to add the NAS-folder to my Windows tablet and to make it available offline. The result is that all my music is copied to a hidden folder on my Windows Computer. But I have no confidence in this offline copy stuff. If I want to have all the music locally on my computer it is easier for me to explicitly copy it to my music library. There exist multiple tools that handle this copying-job better than Windows-offline copy. I decided to use FreeFileSync for this.
So at the end there seems to be no way to directly access my NAS-hosted music by a music app.
If You have the same problem I invite You to vote for a better solution:
If many of You have voted with “Yes” I will combine all Your votes and comments to a single mail and send it to Microsoft.
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More posts about Windows 8.1: Tiles and Touch, Category Windows.
Trigger Spectrum 
The first step is to understand why MS so far hasn’t (and doesn’t intend to) deliver this feature. This is my current understanding:
Imagine 10’000 audio files sitting on your NAS. Any application wanting to catalogue your music library must first open each file, scan its contents, and copy any available metadata (i.e. mp3 tags) into its own database. That is how legacy music management applications work.
Consider however, that the NTFS file indexing service already does exactly that. Thanks to its tight integration with the file system, the indexing service has the advantage of being able to maintain a 100% accurate representation of what is actually on the file system, meaning its metadata catalogue is never out of sync with what is actually stored in the audio files. That is not true for the legacy approach, where the applications always included some mechanism for “rescanning” the media library, so it can update its own metadata database to reflect changes that might have occurred since the last time it was run.
Now think of all the implications (I’ve run into all of these):
a)
Opening every media file, scanning its contents and importing the metadata into a local database is very time consuming. Doing so for 10’000 audio files can take a very long time, but doing so over a network can take seemingly forever. These days though, a digital media collection of 10’000 files is already considered rather small. The time it takes to import that metadata will only grow as the average size of people’s media libraries grow. The time it takes to do these metadata imports over a network is becoming unacceptable.
b)
Using the legacy approach, we’re often forced to go through that lengthy metadata import process multiple times. For example, if you use more than a single program to manage your media libraries (which many do), than any change made in one application will require the other applications (which maintain their own local metadata databases) to rescan all the media files on the NAS. If you have three or four such applications, keeping them all in sync becomes a major pain.
c)
The above problem is compounded by those applications which don’t immediately write metadata changes back to the file system on the NAS, but just update their local metadata database. Many users find it confusing, when applications B, C, and D seem unwilling to pick up the changes made in application A (because application A didn’t yet write those changes to the file system.
d)
The last issue (c) is just one of many problems people encountered, when media file metadata is maintained individually by multiple applications. The worst case scenario I’ve encountered was when application B overwrote updates I made in application A, with its own outdated metadata, making a complete mess of my previous changes.
MS is essentially saying that such metadata will now reside in just a single place. That place will be on the system where the audio files reside. Not only that, but it will now be the OS that takes responsibility for ensuring that the catalogued metadata is always in perfect sync with the metadata stored in the audio files. Whether the audio files are stored on the local drive of your Windows laptop/desktop, or on your Windows NAS doesn’t matter. The indexing service will create the catalogue once, and all applications will just access that index. Basically, MS is setting up a centralized metadata repository, so applications don’t have to build that catalogue individually for themselves.
Technically, I think MS has the right approach. The problem arises because Windows is no longer the only game in town, and non Windows based NAS boxes simply can’t create a Windows compatible index to expose to network clients.
So, we do need a solution, but MS is correct to resist going backwards. Instead of wanting Xbox music to build its own metadata catalogue, we should instead be asking MS and NAS developers to work together to implement a Unix compatible Windows Indexing service. That wouldn’t require an entire such service to be built from scratch. Unix already has its own indexing service. However, it would require a façade on top of Unix’s indexing service, that is able to present itself to network clients as if it was a Windows indexing service. I have no idea if that is politically realistic, but MS is shooting themselves in the foot if they don’t offer that level of interoperability.
This should definitely be the preferred solution. Asking MS to attempt this solution would at least make it impossible for them to resist it for technical reasons.
John,
Echoing Dave’s comments, how can you really state what you have just said when Windows Media Player has been doing exactly what you seem to think is a monolithic task for a long time? – AND it’s a system that already runs on the exact same machine. I was merely hoping to take advantage of the newer UI including such apps as Xbox Music (which is kind of the point of windows 8 in the first place) rather than sticking with WMP.
John,
Isn’t that what the DLNA spec is for? I have a Synology Diskstation that is capable of being a DLNA server and serving music to my even my TV (which for being SMART is really DUMB compared to my PC). If I can, on the same device, use Windows Media Player to almost instantly access the thousands of songs and Meta data I have on my Synology why cannot I not use the Metro/Modern version of the application to do the same.
Foobar works perfectly with my Nas music so it is possible to achieve.